Brandishings

New web site

2011-11-28T10:58:00.002-05:00

For those of you who have followed this blog, please be informed that my web site has moved. Here is the new address.

http://www.chadowenbrand.com/

Thank you for your support.

Chad

An Epistle to Dad

2011-05-27T22:51:00.001-04:00

An Epistle to Dad

Hey, dad, it was just forty-eight hours ago, that your youngest son, my brother Lance, sent me a text message, stating, “He’s at home with the Lord.” The Apostle Paul, writing about the moment of death, describes it as an experience of “departing and being with Christ,” and that to be “absent from the body” is to be “present with the Lord.” So, my brother’s words were right-on. I can’t tell you how the last two days have been, only that they have not been what I expected. Some of my theological mentors and friends believe that the doctrine of the “communion of the saints” means, in part, that departed saints have some sense of what the not-yet-departed saints are up to. Believing that is probably true at some level, I just thought I’d write and tell you some things. Some of this I have told you before, but not all of it. The last time I saw you I told you “goodbye,” and, though I think you thought I meant, “see you later,” I had a deep sense then that it was really “Goodbye!”

I got that text message from Lance while I was sitting on the beach with Tina. I had only found out that morning that you had been in the hospital for several days, and that the afternoon before you had gone into coronary arrest. Our family did not want to alarm me to what might just be another in a long line of medical episodes spanning over ten years, especially since we were on vacation, a much-needed vacation for both Tina and me. So they had told me nothing till that morning. But coronary arrest is not just “another episode,” is it, dad? They had to bring you back and put you on a ventilator. I also found out from G (you know, your only daughter) that the preliminary tests after the episode did not look good. BP was down, blood sugar elevated, kidneys shut down, all those bad things that they explain in terms of numbers, as if numbers on a chart, read out to us clinically by a man or woman wearing a white smock, really say anything about what we are going through. The words from G were pretty grim.

We understand grim, don’t we, dad? You had your first heart attack at age twenty-four, bypass at forty-five (that has lasted thirty-one years, not bad!), and over the last years, aneurism, blocked carotids, diabetes, and then, to top it all off, dementia. I can’t tell you how much I have hated your dementia. Much of the last five or six years was lost to you, even though there would be moments of clarity and lucidity. (Sorry for that word, dad, I know you always told me to speak plainly so that every-day folk like you could understand. You were right about that, I have tried hard not to parade my PhD. You will be proud to know that I sometimes tell people it only means, “Piled higher and deeper.”) But I hated your dementia. I did not hate you, I hated it. I even invented names for it, but since mom might see what I am writing here, I will keep those to myself. I know you hated it, too. One day a year or so ago, though I am sure you forgot saying it within a few moments, you looked at G and said, “I am losing my mind, aren’t I?” No grammar check here—that was about as plain as you could put it.

So, here we are. I want to say some things to you, and so, in the hope that maybe you will be able to know that, I am going to write them here. Some of this is hard to say, and if you were still in this age, you might get a little angry with me, but now you have changed, since the Book tells us, “When we see Him we shall be like Him for we will see Him as He is.” Wow! That means more to me now than ever! Since you are no longer a man subject to temptation, I am sure you will be nodding your head, saying, “Yes, let’s get it out. Maybe somebody will be helped.”

I love you, dad, and I have always loved you, as long as I can remember. You taught me how to fish and shoot. I remember when you made me practice in the backyard, casting a rubber plug with my cheap Zebco fishing pole until I could make the plug land inside an old tire halfway across the yard before you would take me fishing. I spent an entire afternoon casting that rubber plug until I got it in nearly every time. Even today I am pretty good with a spinning reel and a fly-rod, and I thank you for that. You taught me how to shoot, and though I never got as good as you, I still love to do it. I suppose one of these days my brothers and I will decide who is going to get which of your many weapons that you have left behind. I don’t know that I am ready to do that anytime soon. As far as I am concerned, they are still yours, dad.

As you of course are fully aware, I am your oldest. I made you a teenage dad by just one week, so we were pretty close in age, in comparison to many fathers and sons. Sometimes oldest sons and their fathers have conflict, and that was true of us. I never liked it, but it happened. You expected a lot out of me as the oldest, and sometimes I lived up to your expectations and sometimes I did not. There were times I wished I had been born third in place of Mike, who came along two years after G and often asked me, “Why do you and dad fight so much,” or Lance, born last, and the least serious of all of us when he was a kid. (Sorry, bro, but it’s true, though you have turned out pretty well in your ‘forties and ‘fifties.) But I was first, and I was first in your line of sight. Yeah, that weapon analogy again.

I never told you this (remember that I said there were some things in my Epistle that you probably didn’t know), but when I was a kid, maybe through Junior High years, when you would get on me about something—whatever it might be, most of the details have escaped my memory by now—I would just take it and be quiet. I would slip off to my room and read, and think about what I would say to you if I had the courage to say it. I thought a lot during those years, because we had a lot of conflicts, you and me. Looking back, I am sure I deserved much of that, but at the time I usually thought that you had gone too far, said too much, expected too highly. So, I just thought about it. “If I had been criticizing me, how would I have done it differently?” “Rather than saying this, I think he should have said that.” Here’s something really interesting, dad. That developed a pattern and a habit in my life of going down deep inside and pondering over almost every issue I faced, “How could I say that differently?” “What is the more correct and communicable way of stating this problem?” As you know, dad, I am a teacher. Many of my students think I am pretty good at it. What I have never told any of them, what I have only shared with the two women most important in my life (and you know who they are) is that my dad made me a good communicator. Well, along with the Lord! You made me go deep inside and to labor for clarity and accuracy in all I say and do. That has never left me in all these years. Maybe the method could have been different, but we all have our ways of learning! Now, here, if you can find a way to read this, I am telling you, “Thank you!” You and the Lord made me what I am in this area, along with some help from my mentor, Tom Pratt.

Oh, yeah, I just mentioned reading in that last paragraph. I know that neither you nor mom made it through the tenth grade, but both of you inspired me to be a reader. Night after night I would watch the two of you read. You read Popular Science magazine and mom read the Bible, that old red leather Scofield Bible that looked like it had been run over by a Mac truck, but only because she wore it out in reading! You read. Of course, through elementary and into Junior High years you read because we rarely had a television that worked. We had one, it just didn’t work. There it sat in the living room with Rabbit Ears on top and a Pepsi bottle perched beside it. But it did not get any TV! You would buy them at second-hand stores and we would be all excited because we were going to be able to watch the whole season of Star Trek or Gilligan’s Island, but then about the seventh or eighth episode I would come home and the TV was out, and then we would not have one for another six months until you found another used one at a garage sale or some other cheap venue. A part me hated that, but what it did was it sent me to Jules Verne and Herman Melville and Zane Grey and Arthur Conan Doyle and Spiderman. (I didn’t say it was all high-culture reading.) And it also sent me to Tolkien when I was fourteen and we were in one of those “The TV is busted” periods. As much as anything besides God’s Word, Tolkien changed my life. Of course, at times you were frustrated with my addiction to reading, as was mom, who might find me in the morning under the covers with a flashlight and extra batteries, having spent the entire night reading through “Mysterious Island.” So, though you put up with a lot of complaining from me and the other three over the TV, and you griped at me often as not for my reading habits, you changed my life again. It happened as an “unintended consequence,” but it happened.

By the time I was in high school and afterwards, I started using some of the speeches toward you that I would work out in my head lying in bed at night. Dad, I guess that we have been “toe-to-toe” at least as often as we saw “eye-to-eye.” We had some doozies! Mom, saint that she is, often would speak to me afterward and say, “Now you just have to understand, your dad grew up in the Depression, and that’s why he is the way he is.” Or, “You know your dad’s father abandoned him and his sister and his mom when your dad was four, and that has left a mark on him.” It was all true. Of course, you were adopted by your maternal grandmother and her second husband when your mother said she could not raise you and your sister. That is why my name is Chad Owen Brand rather than Chad Owen Snyder. (Kind of glad on that one, no bad thoughts toward “Snyders.”) I am glad you were adopted by Charles Oscar Brand. Your birth mother was a real wildcat! When she got mad she would ring the heads off of baby chicks! We did not look forward to going to “Grandma’s house,” and I guess if you inherited some of her temperament, then our battles were understandable. I remember you telling me as a kid that you were your own uncle, and when I figured the whole adoption thing, I guessed you were right. If I had only had some entrepreneurial spirit and better rhyming ability we might have come up with a hit country song, though, “I’m my own Uncle” does not have the same ring to it as “I’m my own Grandpa.”

That reminds me, I probably have you to thank for my love for Western films and Country music. When we did have a TV, it was usually on a channel showing a Western film, or Gunsmoke, or Bonanza. I grew up loving the Duke, Johnny Cash and Hank Williams (the real one), and still rank Shane as one of my top-five favorite films. I remember the night you introduced me to that movie, claiming it was one of your all-time favorites. I also remember that I felt closer to you that night than I ever had before. When I started having kids, introducing them to my favorite movies was one of my favorite things to do, and now they are passing on that heritage to their own children, Tashia with Katelynn, Madison, and Cora, Owen with Buck, and Cassie with Keira and Kameron. Thanks for that, dad.

One of the things that I think about with pride toward you is that you were not unwilling to change. Notice how I put that. I did not say you were “willing to change,” only that you were “not unwilling to change.” The thing that comes first to mind is the race issue. You grew up south of the Mason-Dixon line, and when I was a teenager, that was obvious. I remember the debate at the dinner table that day in April, 1968, after MLK was assassinated. I defended the great man, and you denigrated him. We fought that battle for a long time, and not just that night. I grew up, left home, and raised my own family. Then one day about eight or ten years ago, my daughter Cassie told me she was going on a date. When the young man came to pick her up, I discovered that it was a young black man that she was going out with. I had to look myself in the mirror after they left and ask myself, “Did I mean all that stuff that I used to say to my dad when I was a kid?” I decided that I did, and before the second date, I had a long and direct conversation with him about my daughter and my expectations of him, but it was the same conversation I had had with the young men who had dated my older daughter Tashia several years before. I did not change it because he was a young black man. But here is the point, dad. Two years ago I brought my daughter and her black husband and children to meet you, and you treated him the same as you treated any of the spouses of my kids. That’s not necessarily a compliment, you understand! But you were not the Edd Brand of 1968, and I knew that the Lord was real!

But I realize now that I kind of moved too quickly away from the issue of conflict. I have to come back to that, dad, because there was one awful day, and it was not when I was a kid. It was when I was a man, a professor of theology, and a pastor. It was about seven years ago, and, though I am sure you had forgotten about it some time in the last few years, you will recall it if you see these words, since now you are healed of all hurts and sins. It was a day when we were at your house, helping you with some things that needed to be done. In the middle of it, you became very angry with me. We knew that you were changing at the time, but did not know how deep the dementia was working in your mind. But you became angry with me. You said some of the most hurtful things to me that you had ever said. Years of frustration welled up in me, and after listening to you speak, I looked at you and said, “I will never forgive you, and I will never speak to you again.” Mom came up to me and said, “You don’t mean that.” “Yes I do, I replied.” And I left.

I flew back to Kentucky, and over the next days, and even weeks, I thought about what I had said, what I had done. I read the words of Jesus, “If you do not forgive others, then your Father in heaven will not forgive you.” I brooded and waited, and delayed responding to what I knew was the right thing to do. Then one day I looked at myself in the mirror, literally, and the Spirit of God spoke to me and said, “If you do not reconcile with your father, you can never teach another class, you can never preach another sermon, because you are living a lie!”

I know you remember this now. I called you and between sobs and cries I asked you to forgive me for what I had said, to forgive me for my unforgiving spirit. You cried also and begged me to forgive you for what you had said to me that day. Maybe I just have bad memory, but I thought at the time that it was the first time you had ever asked me to forgive you. The next time I saw you, some months later, I think you had forgotten all about that exchange, since the dementia was working its effect on you. But I did not forget, and I will never forget the incredible healing power of repentance and forgiveness. If anyone should have known that, it should have been me. It is ever before me now, and I can’t help but be moved by it in these short two days since you have been gone.

I said earlier in my little note to you that these hours of reflection are not what I had thought they might be. I haven’t been able to remember anything that I am mad at you about. I know they are there, but they don’t matter anymore. I have watched your grandchildren, who virtually worship the ground you walked on, grieve for you in incredible ways. Maybe that’s another sign of redemption, since your grandkids gave you another shot at parenting, and the Lord knows we all fail at that task at some level. You should look at the pictures Cassie posted of you and your grandkids on Facebook. You should have been at Tashia’s this afternoon and listened to what everyone said about you. Remember that Tashia called you “Butterfly” when she first met you, and yesterday her six-year-old Madison was walking around the farm looking for “hurt butterflies” so she could “help fix them.” And she did not even know that her mom called you, “Butterfly.” I walked with my son, Owen, this afternoon on the grounds of the farm in Tennessee, and said, “You know, life is complicated and is mixed with good and bad, but right now all that matters to me is the good.” I also told him that a day would come when he would walk the same ground and talk with his kids about me. It makes me want to be as good of a “Poppi” as you were a “Grandpa.”

Well, dad, it has been forty-eight hours since you left, no, now it has been about forty-nine. You are in heaven with the Lord, and if you get to read these words, know that I love you and am happy for you. I will join you one day, but even that will not be the end of it. Scripture tells us that one day there will be a shout, the voice of the archangel, and the trumpet of God will blow. Then the graves will open and the dead in Christ will rise. You will rise from Denver, I will probably rise from Kentucky. But let’s make a deal, right now. When that day comes, you lean East and I will lean West, and when you see me, grab my hand. With tears in your eyes, you will probably say, “I should have said I am sorry more often.” I will say, “I should have been a more dutiful son.” And then, we will forget all of that because we will have all eternity to enjoy sweet fellowship together in the Lord. “Even so, come Lord Jesus!”

Chad Owen Brand

Excerpt From Chapter on Civil War

2011-05-18T16:53:00.002-04:00

Here is an excerpt from the end of our discussion on the Civil War. If you interested, email me and I will send you the whole discussion (about 28 pages in Word). I will not send you the whole book. You will have to buy that.

One theological issue American Christians faced in the war was how to continue to construe their doctrine of the providence of God. The people prayed for the battles—one group of Americans praying for Confederate victory and another for Union victory on the field of battle. Most of the battles were won by one side or the other. Confederates scored the first victory, then had some setbacks, then regained ground and it was back and forth through 1862, with victories for the South at Seven Days, loss at Stones River, and strategic loss at Antietam. The Confederates did well in 1863 at Chickamauga and Chancellorsville, but also lost major battles at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga. Then the tide turned against the Confederacy in 1864 with inconclusive larger battles, but with a loss of the means to continue the war. Both sides invoked the same God, asking him to help their cause and at the end of the day recognizing, whatever the outcome, that his will was done. Over and over they did this. John Adger, Southern Presbyterian, once the war was over, went to great lengths to insist on “the justice of the Southern cause,” but also conceded that “there was one error . . . into which we acknowledge that some Southern ministers sometimes fell.” That error was to believe that God must surely bless the right. What the Southerners had learn through the disposition of the war was that often let :the righteous . . . be overthrown.” Godly ministers may pray, but the outcome is left with God. His conclusion was, “Yes! The hand of God, gracious though heavy, is upon the South for her discipline.” It was not simply faith in the Bible that was at stake for war America, but faith in God himself.
A related issue had to do with military protocol in relation to civilians. The army leaders on both sides had been trained at West Point, believed the same doctrines of war, understood the same tactics and strategies in battle. One of their deepest held convictions was that war was for soldiers, not for civilians. This conviction held for the first year-and-a-half. In October 1862 William Tecumseh Sherman, attempting to hold on to his victory in Memphis sustained a series of guerilla attacks from Confederate fighters. In response he destroyed the town of Randolph, Tennessee. When the next attack came he destroyed all homes, farms and crops along a fifteen-mile stretch south of Memphis. “When a Memphis woman objected, Sherman replied that God Himself had destroyed entire populations for far lesser crimes.” This would be especially the lesson learned late in the war through Sherman’s march to the sea, exercising a final “vengeance upon South Carolina” for starting this whole mess.
One more thing needs to be said before we make a few notes about the economic impact of the war and then move on. The Civil War was, as we indicated earlier, the second defining moment in America’s history, which is why we have given it so much attention in our narrative. A third will come in the next century, and we will also give it a close look. A newcomer to the United States may have made the most telling comment on the nature of slavery and the war. His name was Philip Schaff, and he was a native Swiss who had studied in German, then accepted a call to teach at the German Reformed seminary in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. In 1861 he penned a review article in the Mercersburg Review in which he called for the gradual, voluntary end to slavery, but noted also that, “The negro question lies far deeper than the slavery question.” Schaff, it turns out, was quite prescient. The Civil War did solve the slavery issue, once and for all, but neither the war, nor twelve years of “Reconstruction,” that is, oversight from the Federal government over the governing policies of the eleven rebel states, nor decades of Jim Crow and prejudice solved the “negro problem.” We will have to see whether that does get some kind of solution later in our story.

Chad Owen Brand

OPS (Other Peoples' Sins)

2011-05-07T11:14:00.000-04:00

Sometimes the sins of others have a sanctifying effect on us. You can see hatred manifested in a dramatically horrible way, and it can so impact you that the next time you are tempted to lash out, you feel the twinge of pain that you felt when you observed that other act of hatred. It brings revulsion and repentance to your soul, and you simply say, “God help me, but I cannot go there, even though my heart sometimes wants to take me there.” It is both a sad and a glorious thing.

In 1 Corinthians we find the story of a church that was filled with various kinds of sins: sins of immorality, sins of dis-fellowship, sins of pride and arrogance, sins of theological defection, and more besides. Paul wrote this letter and in the providence of God it has been preserved for our edification and instruction. What do we get from it? Many things. But one thing we certainly get from the letter is that the sins of others are displayed so that we might learn from them not to do them. The sins of the Corinthians can have a sanctifying impact on us.

The same is true in our contemporary fellowship with believers and in our relationships with non-believers, both within and outside the church. You observe someone’s flash of anger in church and realize how much pain that has caused to a child observing it, and it makes you aware of how your own anger can be destructive. Someone you know asserts himself with arrogance and pride and that assertion brings disrepute to the cause of Christ in a community, and that makes you recognize that your own pride can do the very same thing. You are stunned to find that someone in your circle of friends has fallen prey to sins of sensuality, and at first it makes you want to be critical, and that is probably something that is appropriate, but it also reminds you that we are all vulnerable and that we can all fall prey to temptation. So, we humble ourselves before God and ask for grace and mercy.

We need to pray for one another that we will find sanctification, “without which no one shall see God” (Hebrews 12:14). We need to seek the holiness of the Lord in our own lives. At the same time, we can learn much from the sins of others. In playing pool, you often “go to school on the other guy’s shot.” We can do the same in life.

Chad Owen Brand

Justice and Retribution: Bin Laden

2011-05-02T11:00:00.003-04:00

Shakespeare's Fool in Hamlet famously stated that "History is like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." September 11, 2001 seemed to bear that sentiment out. What has just happened to us, and why? But last night, about 10:45 PM, the "sound and fury" resolved themselves into a major chord of resolution, as we heard the news that justice had finally been done.

Usama Bin Laden has made a career of terrorism. Wandering from one patron to another, often duping those who thought he was serving their purposes, he ultimately was serving his own purpose, the purpose of destroying the non-Islamic world, but not merely that. His terrorism spent itself also in the destruction of Muslims, Muslims who did not support his brand of Islamic fanaticism.

That career is now over. Undoubtedly, some Christians (and others) will begin to second guess whether this act of justice was, well, just. After all, he had been marginalized and forced to live on the run, hiding in the mountains and in compounds where his quality of life was likely very meager. Perhaps that ought to be seen as punishment enough. And what about "Thou shalt not kill"? It is not as though he was in our country and could have been abducted by the police and put on trial. He was only apprehended by a nearly ten-year-long mission to find him and take him down, a mission that has cost American tax-payers billions of dollars. Why not just leave him to the Lord, and let God sort it out?

The answer is that God has ordained that justice in this age, for the matters of this life, in so far as justice can possibly be meted out in this age, should be carried out by governments. That is Paul's whole point in Romans 13:4. The government has been given the power of the sword and is a "minister" of God to the end of justice in this age. In other words, for governments not to carry out that role would be an abandonment of their calling. The US military forces that killed Bin Laden were doing their God-ordained duty, even if they did not see it in just those terms. Just yesterday I had a conversation with a 94-year old man who spent three years fighting the Nazis in France and Belgium. As he put it to me, "We were doing the Lord's work." Indeed they were, and I told him so! The men who lifted their weapons yesterday and drew down on this terrorist were doing the Lord's will every bit as much as pastors, standing in the pulpit, bringing the Word to his people yesterday, were doing the Lord's will.

I am not glorifying death. I am not in any way a hater of Muslims, though I reject Islam as a false gospel. I am not a hawk, calling for more war and death and destruction. I love peace, and I would wish that no other person, American or otherwise, would have to die for his country in war. But what I am saying is that the American government had a God-ordained duty to bring this man to justice, dead or alive. It has done so, and our attitude ought to be one of gratitude, of solemn recognition that our sins will find us out, and of knowing that every person will one day stand before God to be judged according to the deeds done in the body. We may take a moment to rejoice, but we also need to look to ourselves to be sure that our hearts are right before God.

Justice cannot always be meted out in this age. Adolf Hitler had to face the Lord without temporal justice being passed on him. On May 1st, 1945, it was announced to the world that Hitler was dead; exactly sixty-six years later, May 1st, 2011, it was announced that Bin Laden was dead. Our government has done the right thing. I am grateful to the President, to the American military, to the Pakistani government, and to Bible teachers and readers who still believe that justice is important in this age, as well as in the age to come.

Chad Owen Brand

Trinitarian Monotheism, Economics, and the American Revolution

2011-03-11T20:48:00.002-05:00

[The following is the first few paragraphs of a paper I delivered at the "Hobbs's Lecture" on March 9, at Oklahoma Baptist university. Read on down and see if you would like to have the rest.]

Trinitarian Monotheism, Economics, and the American Revolution
Chad Owen Brand

In his essay, “Good Infection,” C. S. Lewis talks about two basic things—that being Triune is intrinsic to who God is, thus enabling him to be love since the Father and the Son have existed in a relation of love for eternity—and that we can draw benefit from what it means for God to be Triune by being infected with the impact of God’s Triune nature by the work of the Spirit who applies the benefits of our salvation to us.
The early Christians had a great challenge, the challenge to re-envision the nature of the monotheistic God of Judaism now that they understood that the Son was divine and that the Spirit, poured out on them at Pentecost, was also divine, and to understand all of that in the context of the Old Testament faith that there is only one God. They worked on the language for decades, trying to get it right, since they rightly believed that if they did not get this right, they would probably be off everywhere. And the language that they were eventually satisfied with was the language of the Nicene Creed, along with the additions to that Creed made at the Council of Constantinople. But that alone was not enough.
They also knew that they had to conceptualize God’s relationship to the world in just the right way (a task partly solved by the language of the Creed), and that they had rightly to construe the nature of their ongoing conversations about all things theological (a task that certainly was part of what they were doing at the Council). They probably did not say all of that in just the way that I have said it, but this was part of their intent. One of the reasons for these two tasks was that those two questions had been faced and dealt with by the broad variety of religious traditions that stretched back into antiquity.
Let’s take the first question: what is God’s relationship to this world? There are three possible answers. The first is that God is remote from this world. Some religions argued that God made the world, but that having made it, he wanted nothing more to do with it. Others argued that he did not even make the world in the first place, and in that case he certainly wanted nothing to do with it. Another possibility is that God is completely immanent in the world, that he is virtually identified with the world, and that it is impossible to separate the identity of the world from the identity of God. If the first option could be analogous to God as some distant star right on the very edge of sight, the second would be analogous to the idea that God is like the dew that one finds on wet grass every morning. It is just there. But there is a third option, and that is that God is transcendent, that he is above us, but not far above us. He is above us, but he is reachable, not reachable by our stretching up to him, but by his reaching down to us. God may be variously pictured here as a lightning bolt that stabs out of the heavens, or as a gentle rain that refreshes our souls. This is of course the Christian view and it is enshrined in the Creed that states the maker of heaven and earth sent his son to die in our stead and then sent his Spirit to indwell us and to bring his spiritual presence into our very hearts. That makes Christianity unique among the religions of the world in the approachableness of God by his grace.
Then there was the second question, almost a background question. Just how do we talk about God? This was a serious matter at that first ecumenical council, for the Arians, those who were proposing to reject the deity of the Son, wanted only to quote verses from the Bible. But the other party, the party that won the debate, argued that we ought to be able to use human speech, rational speech, to talk about God, in ways that were consistent with Scripture but that extrapolated from Scripture and went beyond it. How could they defend such an argument? They argued that God had made us rational creatures in his own image, and based on that conviction, that our theology can and ought to be more that simply parroting Bible verses. In that moment, at that auspicious occasion, rational theology was born, and with the birth of rational theology, came, eventually, the rise of reason, the rise of innovation in commerce, the rise of science, and eventually, the iPhone. In other words, the notion of progress is an inherently Christian notion. All because of some cantankerous bishops debating the nature of God in western Turkey in 325 AD. Well, not just because of that.
It may seem odd to us, but the notion of reason and rational speech had never been applied to theological questions before. That is not to say that people had not talked about religion or theology. They had. But the idea that a discourse could lead to progress in understanding and that such progress could then be applied to other disciplines beyond theology so that they all contributed one to another had not. Not till Christianity, and not even to all Christianity, but only to western European Christianity, and that is because of western Christian ways of thinking biblically. The Chinese have had a longer cultural awareness than the west, but science did not originate there. Rodney Stark says that was because for them the universe simply is, and has always been that way. There is no reason to think that it functions according to some natural laws. Chinese intellectuals pursued enlightenment, not explanations. The Greeks did not invent science, though if anyone could, it would have been them. But their gods are inferior creatures and they saw nature as just endless cycles. Even Plato could not get there since his creator Demiurge was not even God, and Plato’s entire approach was to see this world as inferior to the real world of the heavenly forms. That just does not fire up the scientific imagination. But in western Christianity a series of episodes, some of them not even connected to one another directly led to a belief in progress, in science, and in human freedom. We will take the next few minutes to sketch some of the high (and low) points of just how that happened.

(If you would like to read the rest of the essay, email me at cbrand@sbts.edu and I will email you a copy.)

Christian Political Theology

2010-10-07T10:29:00.002-04:00

In an excellent book published in 2007, The Stillborn God, Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla lays out an excellent analysis of what he calls the demise of Christian political theology. He argues that political theology arose in Greece, was transferred to Rome when that power overwhelmed the Mediterranean world, and after Constantine, it arose in the newly Christianized Roman context, but now as a "Christian political theology." That political theology was developed first by thinkers such as Eusebius, Athanasius, and the Cappadocian Fathers, but in spades by Augustine, especially in his City of God. Thomas further explicated how this could work, using especially Aristotelian categories, and Calvin finished the exposition, using biblical models for understanding exactly how such a culture should be molded.

This Christian political theology was not specific about just exactly what kind of rule was best (monarchy, empire, aristocracy, or polity), so that there was a great fluidity in Christian politics. But at some level the king was seen as the body of society and the church as its soul, or in some situations the king was seen as having "two bodies,"one physical and the other spiritual, or society was pictured as having two swords. In this trinitarian, incarnational theology of a God who was transcendent, yet not remote, lay the notion that God was close enough that he could come to us or that we could come to him, and that part of the governing structure of the body politic was to maintain that connection or nexus, however conceived.

Lilla argues that the beginnings of the end of this synthesis came with the English civil war. That war, waged largely between two varying interpretations of Anglicanism, brought an immediate, though not final, end to Anglican episcopacy. Lilla argues, though, that it had a larger impact. That impact can be seen especially in the work of Thomas Hobbes, and to a lesser degree, in the writings of John Locke. Hobbes's Leviathan spelled the end of Christian political theology, at least in the sense that he demonstrated it was no longer necessary, and that eventually it would fade from view. In the centuries that followed, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Marx and others would add their voices to the mix, and the result is what we see in European societies today, and, in an increasing obvious manner, in America.

The analysis is brief, though trenchant. One does not have to agree with all of Lilla's assumptions or conclusions to recognize that this is an important book. What surprises me is that I have missed the book for over two years though I have been working in this area. I recommend this as an important read for those interested in history, politics, or theology. Or all three!

Chad Owen Brand

DONALD GEORGE BLOESCH, 1928-2010

2010-08-27T16:28:00.002-04:00

Donald Bloesch went to be with the Lord Tuesday, August 24, 2010. My interest in him goes back several decades, but his work on theological method was the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation in 1998. Bloesch was trained at the University of Chicago Divinity School and was a theologian in the United Church of Christ. He should have been a Process theologian, or at least a liberal in the old fashioned way of a Harry Emerson Fosdick or a William Newton Clarke. He was not. Encounters with Karl Barth, various American evangelicals, different forms of pietism, and a Bible-believing wife caused Bloesch to move increasingly in evangelical directions over the years. He was hired to teach at University of Dubuque Theological Seminary precisely because the administration was tired of their older professor (Arthur Cochrane), who was neoorthodox; they believed, because of his training and his heritage, that Bloesch would be a liberal. It was the first two years after doctoral studies that changed him. Bloesch wrote over thirty-five books in his lifetime, including two systematic theology sets, the first a two-volume systematic published in 1979, and the other a seven-volume opus published between 1992 and 2004. The latter set stands out as a remarkable addition to the field. Irenic, though feisty, Bloesch is often a joy to read, though at times he can frustrate evangelicals. He tends (though not always) to break most issues down into three possibilities: the liberal/mystical/irrational/novel possibility; the fundamentalist/simplistic/rationalist/traditional possibility; and then the third, which is his view and the correct view. His historical analyses were often brilliant, his exegesis was often sparse, and his knowledge of the literature was generally impressive. It is a rare theologian who really likes Irenaeus, Augustine, Anselm, Calvin, Luther, Wesley, Bavinck, Herrmann, Barth, Ellul, and Rahner all at the same time. If you want to position him at all, it is somewhere between Kierkegaard and Kuyper, somewhere between Henry and Herrmann. Bloesch made no large bold moves, hence there are no Bloeschites (or only a small group of them), but he made many small bold moves. He opposed what he called Carl Henry's evangelical rationalism, but he anathematized feminism's tendency to rename God into a feminine deity--he thought Henry compromised, but he considered Sallie McFague's theology to be idolatry. Thank God for Donald Bloesch. He will be missed, but his legacy is still here for us to learn from.

Chad Brand
Professor of Christian Theology
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

ADAM SMITH AND THE FIRST MAJOR INSTALLMENT OF "THE DISMAL SCIENCE"

2010-06-07T20:56:00.004-04:00

Adam Smith and the First Major Installment of
“The Dismal Science”

Before the late eighteenth century, various thinkers gave serious consideration to the interface between theology, politics, and economic issues. But it is clear that none of these thinkers, not even Thomas Aquinas or John Calvin, had really developed a full-blown theory of how economies worked. In 1776, however, that empty spot would be filled. In that year, a Scottish “moral philosopher” named Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, a volume destined to rock the intellectual world almost as powerfully as the revolution of that same year rocked the international world of politics.

Sometimes it seems as though a mystical sort of synchronicity brings apparently disparate forces together at the same moment. The late eighteenth century witnessed revolutions of various sorts—the two most prominent being the French and American revolutions, one of which created a new republic, and the other of which eventually created a new despotism. But political revolutions were not the only type of that genre. The Industrial Revolution was whipping into fever pitch at about the same time as the American Revolution, with new technologies such as the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and just a few years later, the cotton gin. This revolution in technology was preceded, about a century earlier, by a Scientific Revolution known to us as the Enlightenment. That movement, insofar as it can be called a “movement,” itself built on the foundation of the Reformation, which was ushered in at least partly as a result of the Renaissance, an intellectual and artistic explosion which was also preceded by the Scholastic tradition of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What seems clear from this is that there is no mystical synchronicity, but, rather, movements and individuals building their innovations, in part, on foundations laid by others.

It is not mere happenstance that the Industrial Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and Adam Smith’s famous volume all came at about the same time. (It is a bit odd that the Declaration and Wealth of Nations happened the same year, though!) These are connected to one another, even as they built on the foundations laid by Renaissance and Scholastic Scholars, and on the religious ideologies of the Protestant Reformers and the Evangelical Revivalists. The individualism implied in Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith, the notion of personal responsibility found in Calvin’s views on work, the concept of political freedom in a state with a division of powers articulated by both Locke and Montesquieu all came together in Smith’s volume and drove him to articulate a view of economics which is implicit in many of those earlier thinkers, but which never did quite come together until his work. As Skousen puts it, “Prior to this famous date, six thousand years of recorded history had passed without a seminal work being published on the subject that dominated every waking hour of practically every human being: making a living.” That history changed in a single day.

Smith’s basic ideology can be easily summed up, though his tome was nearly a thousand pages long. He believed in free trade, the division of labor, and the development of industrial technology. Throughout the book Smith advocated the principle of “natural liberty,” which meant, for him, that people ought to have the freedom to do what they want with little interference from the state, so long as they are law-abiding citizens. This is especially the case with reference to economic decisions. Smith believed that economic freedom was a basic human liberty, a view that he held in common with John Locke, who affirmed that we have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. In Wealth of Nations, he argued, “To prohibit a great people . . . from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.” The Scottish philosopher made it his point to stand up for those rights.

What was this “natural freedom”? For our Adam Smith, it included the right to buy goods from any source without having to pay crippling tariffs if the goods happened to be imported. It includes the right to seek any kind of employment one might desire. This was heavily restricted in most European countries in Smith’s day by both government regulations that required workers to obtain government permission to change jobs and by the stranglehold that trade guilds had on most skilled labor, trade guilds that held their authority by government sanction. Natural liberty for Smith also entailed the right to pay any wage that the market might bear and to charge any price for goods that the market might sustain, without the government setting standards for such things, arbitrary or otherwise. It also included the freedom to generate, accumulate, retain, and pass on capital and wealth to the next generation (or to anyone else) without government intrusion in the process. Adam Smith encouraged “the virtues of thrift, capital investment, and labor-saving machinery as essential ingredients to promote rising living standards.”

The most obvious implication of “natural liberty” was free trade. But Smith wrote during a time when trade was anything but free. Since the prevailing belief of mercantilism was that wealth was defined in terms of the accumulation of silver and gold, any threat to that supply was tantamount to a military threat. Because of that, most European countries had elaborate protectionist policies in matters of trade. High import tariffs were used to make it economically difficult for foreign countries to sell their goods in other countries—the cost passed on to consumers made it difficult for any but the richest of persons to buy those commodities. In the mercantilist understanding, trade was war.

Presumably that policy protected domestic production and manufacturing. Of course, what happened was that other countries enacted similar protective tariffs, thus preventing exports, which in turn damaged the economy of the producing nation that wanted to sell its goods in other countries. Smith argued that this circular policy of protection and threat helped no one in the long run, except the governments that collected the tariffs. When international trade itself is viewed as a kind of warfare, no one is helped and everyone is hurt. So, Smith argued for massive reductions of tariffs as a means to causing the wealth of all nations to increase. In his understanding the wealth of nations was not gold and silver, but productivity.

The second implication of “natural liberty” was the division of labor. Many trades had been regulated by government, by trade guilds, and by lack of technological advance so that there were many barriers to a worker being able to be hired and to have mobility in the work place. But in the area of technological development and innovation that came with industrialization some of that was already beginning to change in Smith’s day. His most famous example of the division of labor is his discussion if the “pin factory.” In previous generations a single individual would apprentice and then eventually master the skill of making pins to be used by seamstresses. There were many steps in making pins—cutting the wire, straightening the wire, sharpening the point, making the head, packaging the pins, and so forth. Pin-makers carefully protected their trade so that they could keep the price of pins high and so that they could earn a good profit, and forces within government and the guilds helped keep them protected.

Smith proposed, however, that an assembly-line process made more sense. Rather than have one man working, and making, perhaps, twenty pins in a day, Smith conjectured that ten workers, each of whom was adept at only one part of the process—cutting wire, sharpening points, etc.—that such persons, because they were not having to stop over and over again in the day to change work stations (Smith called it, quaintly, "sauntering"), could be far more productive. He estimated that the twenty pins made by one man per day might actually exceed 48,000 pins made by ten people operating under the principle of the “division of labor.” This would create more productivity, would employ more people in the making of pins, and would cause the cost of pins to decrease substantially, which, in turn, would lower household expenses, freeing up capital to be used to purchase other commodities, which, in turn, would create more jobs. Someone is hurt in the division of labor of course—the Master pin-maker, who now has to find other employment—but vast numbers of other people are helped in the process.

The third entailment of “natural liberty” would be to encourage industrial technological development. If the government and the guilds no longer control manufacturing and commerce, entrepreneurs and inventors would have a financial incentive to devote creative energy and time to technological development. When we think of the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, we think of a time of great technological advances. The steam engine (used on both land and water), the spinning jenny, the cotton gin, agriculture advances such as the McCormick reaper and the John Deere steel plow and new forms of milling grain and many other examples could be adduced to demonstrate how the Scientific Revolution had impacted and produced the Industrial Revolution.

It is not merely coincidence that many of these new inventions were created in Britain where governmental changes were giving greater freedom to individuals and in the new United States of America where the government laid a lighter hand on business and inventive creativity. Smith believed that a greater degree of liberty granted by governments would inevitably result in newer inventions that would make labor easier, faster, and more profitable. He was convinced that there was nothing wrong and everything right with all of this.

“Natural liberty” then was the key to economic development and the rising wealth of nations. There were, in addition, two other elements that we will discuss more briefly. The first is competition. Individuals have the right to compete with one another in the production and exchange of goods and services. Competition, in Smith’s view, is a sign of a healthy economy. There are several threats to competition, most of which are represented by the two regular sources of difficulty Smith had already identified: government and protectionist trade guilds or unions.

Governments can and do give preferential treatment either to certain sectors of the economy, or to certain competitors for the market within the economy, or to the guilds and unions. This is, in fact, the historic trend of governments all over the world. Some sector of the economy or some union or some wealthy entrepreneur provides needed political support to governmental leaders, and, in turn, they are rewarded with special government protection. This undermines competition, and, in the long run, eviscerates the freedoms of the people, and generally causes an increase in the cost for goods and service for all. To put it practically, it creates unemployment and rising inflation, along with other economic difficulties.

Alongside “natural liberty” and “competition,” Smith identifies one other important component to the development of wealth, and that is “justice.” “Justice,” for Smith, means that the economic actions of individuals must be just and honest. This is an important aspect of Smith’s philosophy that is sometimes ignored by his critics. Economic exchanges ought to be done in a just and honest manner. “Capitalism” (not Smith’s word, by the way), is not greed endorsed by political entitlement. This statement by Smith incorporates all three elements: “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men.” In other words, the process works as people pursue their own interests, but pursue them in a just manner.

When these three components come together in a nation’s economy, argued Smith, there will develop a “natural harmony” of interests between workers, landlords, entrepreneurs, and investors. In the pin factory workers and managers have to work together to accomplish their tasks. The division of labor was, for Smith, the key to a productive economy.

Consider the manufacture of a wool coat. There are dozens of steps in the process of growing the wool, shearing the sheep, making the cloth, producing the dye, bringing other cloths such as cotton into the process, the manufacture of buttons, of a fur collar, and many other steps besides. Large numbers of workers, most of whom never meet one another, are involved in making a single woolen coat. Each of their labor contributes to the other, though they never meet. Nor will they likely meet the eventual purchaser of the finished product—the retail consumer. At every step along the way people are simply pursuing their own self-interests—working to earn a paycheck, operating a business for profit, participating in a craft for various reasons, and shopping—and the net result is that everyone gets something out of it, something that they want.

Why does each one do that? Because each one is seeking his or her own self-interest of putting food on the table, of paying for college education, and so on. “By pursuing his own self-interest, every individual is led by an invisible hand to promote the public interest.” The larger part of this particular paragraph is worth quoting: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love. . . . Every individual . . . who employs capital . . . and labours . . . neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it . . . he is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. . . . By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society." Through the concept of the “invisible hand,” Smith contends that if an economy is just left to operate, it will do so in such a way that peoples’ needs are met through the hydraulic process of working and living, buying and selling, running businesses and employing personnel.

Though this part of Smith’s argument has sometimes been vilified by critics as “Smith’s grabbing hand,” this is to misunderstand his whole point. He is simply saying that an economic system in this age in which we live is not intended to and never could work simply on an altruistic basis and no other. Rather, each man or woman, knowing his or her own needs and the needs of the family, will work to supply those needs. But each one working to supply the needs of family will contribute to the whole enterprise. Would there be abuses to the system that might arise? Certainly, and it would not be long before critics would identify Das Adam Smith Problem. That will be dealt with later in this discussion (actually not in this blog--you have to buy the book!).

Smith’s views on free trade spilled over into his understanding of religious freedom. He lived, of course, in a country, Scotland, that had a state church, though by his day there was a great deal of religious liberty in his country. Smith believed that “a great multitude of religious sects” would promote toleration and would be a healthy thing for a nation. In other words, what he thought was good for the economy—freedom from government intrusion—he also believed was good for church and religion.

Smith’s book was not met with universal acclaim, though at the time it was hard to find any substantial critics. Certainly in the next century the book would have plenty of detractors. But the book has received high praise, even from those who, at the end of the day, do not accept his system of economics. English historian Henry Thomas Buckle opined that in terms of its eventual impact, the book “is probably the most important book that has ever been written.” Readers on both sides of the Atlantic found this tome to be extremely helpful in understanding just what economics is, and just why nations had struggled for centuries to generate and sustain wealth over time. The book just “made sense” to many in its day, not the least of which intellectuals and industrialists in the new world of America.

One other issue has to be dealt with in understanding Adam Smith’s contribution to economics. As we noted earlier, Smith argues that the primary motive for economic activity is “self-interest.” Everyone, pursuing the need to take care of the needs of themselves and their family, will engage in work, commerce, and buying and selling. But that is not the only motivation for Smith. The other is “sympathy.” He argued that everyone has a basic desire to be accepted by others. In pre-industrial times this manifested itself in village life where everyone knew everyone else and where it was important to build good relations so that one’s business and personal life could prosper. Even in the industrialized city, though, this would still be necessary, since, over the long run, a good reputation would be important for success. But these two motivations might appear to be at odds with one another. German philosophers believed they were, and designated this motivation crisis, “Das Adam Smith Problem.” It was not a problem for Smith himself, however, since it was his belief that economic activity and moral behavior were not contradictory to each other.

In the early twenty-first century we live in a time when capitalism has been written off by many. Some even claim that it is the cause of the economic woes that have afflicted us recently. They say, "we have tried that, and look where it has gotten us." I want to respond by saying, "We have never tried it." Even in our country since at least the 1860s government intrusion of and manipulation of the economy (usually at the request of business!) have left us with a model not really tried in a national economy. I think we need a Das Adam Smith Revival!

(Excerpted from the forthcoming book, Seeking the City by Chad Brand and Tom Pratt.)

Chad Owen Brand

A Little Taste of Things to Come

2010-05-29T10:03:00.002-04:00

A Little Taste of Things to Come

Here are a couple of historical paragraphs from the new book, Seeking the City: Wealth, Work and Stewardship in the Bible and History, which will be complete and sent off to publisher next week:

Before the rise of the modern world there was the notion that everyone had a place to fill, a task that had been given to them, and that they ought to be content with that and not attempt to change anything about it. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales the Parson says, “God had ordained that some folk should be more high in estate and in degree and some folk more low and everyone should be served in his estate and in his degree.” Stick to what is yours. If you are a Lord, then be a Lord, and if you are a peasant, be content with that. Every political theorist from Plato to Aristotle to Augustine to Thomas Aquinas agreed on this. Humans are equal to one another only in that they are all humans and share in a common humanity. They are not equal in opportunity, however, but are virtually locked in to a status in life from which there is little hope for deviation, barring some tremendous shift in fortune.
As we have seen, though, movements such as the Reformation brought attention to individuals, to their own choices, and made it clear that such static roles might not be fixed. Individuals are worth something, and they have the ability to make choices that can change their lives in dramatic ways. That idea will only grow more and more common with the passing of time in early modern Europe, and will spill over beyond Protestant borders into Catholic thought as well. What is happening from the Reformation on to the late eighteenth century is a rising tide of individualism, and with it an attendant political philosophy of republicanism, and with those a concomitant notion of a free economy. These are, however, ideas slow to flower.

Chad Owen Brand

FASCISM, THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, AND GOVERNMENTAL SUSPENSION OF DEMOCRACY

2010-03-06T18:17:00.011-05:00

Fascism, the French Revolution, and Governmental Suspension of Democracy

The American Revolution was not the only revolution of the late eighteenth century. The French Revolution (1789-99) saw that nation move from a monarchy to a republic to an anarchic state to a constitutional democracy to an empire in the space of ten years. Several years of famine and severe food shortages, coupled with crippling debt, created a severe economic crisis. The later Bourbon kings made foolish decisions relative to the French economy that devastated it. Louis XV spent massive amounts of money fighting the British in the American colonies in what was known in Europe as the Seven Years War and in America as the French and Indian War. Then his grandson Louis XVI (also known as Louis the Last) poured more resources into the American Revolutionary War, resources he did not have, and so had to borrow heavily from European banking houses. Poor harvests resulted in massive starvation on the part of the poor, all the while the nobility were conspicuous in their lavish consumption. Add to this the problem of how to care for large numbers of veterans of the wars against the British, massive unemployment, high bread prices due to the crop failures, and new Enlightenment ideals about the equality of all men, and you have a severe crisis.

In 1789 the Estates-General was called into session, something that had not happened since 1614. The Estates-General was made up of the First Estate, the clergy; the Second Estate, the nobility; and the Third Estate, the rest of France. The monarchy had governed absolutely in the meantime, but the crisis of 1789 made it clear to many intellectuals, nobles, church leaders, and activists, that the monarchy could not deliver them in the present hour. Together they formed a National Assembly that arrogated to itself the task of governing the nation in the stead of the King. Louis XVI responded by closing the building in which the Assembly was meeting and restructured the finance ministry. Many Parisians interpreted this to be an attempted coup on the part of the King against the National Assembly. With much of the French Guard now supporting them, insurgents stormed the Bastille, where there was a large cache of weapons and ammunition, and which many considered to be a symbol of the now-tyrannical Ancien Regime. The National Assembly thus became the de facto governing body in the stead of the monarchy. The Royal family attempted to leave Paris secretly, but was found out, and brought back. In January, 1793, Louis XVI was found guilty of various crimes and beheaded. Albert Camus commented that this constituted "an act that secularized the French world and banished God from the subsequent history of the French people.”

In the Fall of 1793 the Committee of Public Safety, led by Maximilien Robespierre, took control through a coup and unleashed the Reign of Terror in which over 16,500 people were executed, mostly by the guillotine, though some historians put the number as high as 40,000. Robespierre set price controls on all foodstuffs and many other goods, sent troops into the countryside to seize crops and arrest farmers, prosecuting anyone who resisted or attempted to preserve their own property from being seized by the Committee’s agents. What led him to take such Draconian measures?

Robespierre was a fervent disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who contended that individuals who live in such a way that they place the general will of the public first are truly “free” and “just,” while those who do not live in such a way are criminals or heretics. Those who refuse to live for the common good above all else must be forced to bend to the general will by the state. The state, as it were, “forces” them to be “free.” In so doing, it may have to suspend all of the usual devices of democracy, such as free elections, representative bodies that reflect the views of the majority of the public, and free speech, since those are “hardly ever necessary where the government is well-intentioned. For the rulers know that the general will is always on the side which is most favorable to the public interest, that is to say the most equitable; so that it is needful only to act justly to be certain of following the general will.” Robespierre was simply applying Rousseau to the situation in Paris in 1793. “The people is always worth more than individuals,” as he himself put it. Worth so much more, that the slaughter of tens of thousands of resisters is justifiable—in the name of “justice.”

The French Revolution was the first in a line of revolutions that would lead to totalitarian states. It was a fascist revolution in that, though it cast out the “demonic” religion represented by Roman Catholicism and the First Estate, it then capitulated to a new religion, the religion of the State. It was also the first revolution in modern times that purported to be more democratic for having removed the standard devices that had historically attended true efforts at democratic governing, again, such as free speech, representative government, and freedom from governmental invasion of private property without proper warrant. In France, the real problem was not the economy, not before the Revolution and not after the Revolution. The problem was governmental manipulation of the economy.

That kind of manipulation was something the American Founding Fathers wanted to avoid, at least most of them. The question is, when the government believes it knows best for the people and ignores their express wishes in enforcing legislation, how is this, philosophically, any better than the Committee of Public Safety? How is it any different in our country when our government wants to force legislation down our throats that the vast majority of Americans have clearly stated they do not want? I doubt that heads will roll, but then again, who knows? Maybe this Fall it will be just the heads of Congressional committees.

Chad Owen Brand

ELTON JOHN LOOKS IN THE MIRROR AND CLAIMS TO SEE . . . JESUS

2010-02-19T21:13:00.003-05:00

Elton John Looks in the Mirror and Claims to See . . . Jesus

The Internet is all a-twitter (literally) with Elton John's comment about Jesus. If you have been on Mars the last two days and missed it, here is the gist. In an interview with U.S. magazine, Parade, the 62-year-old musician said, "I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems. On the cross, he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don't know what makes people so cruel. Try being a gay woman in the Middle East - you're as good as dead."

One is reminded of John Lennon's 1966 statement. "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me." I had just discovered the Beatles a year before this, and now his off-the-cuff statement (if it was off the cuff) threatened to remove my Beatles records from my shelf since my parents were incensed by the comment.

Elton John's statement has raised the ire of many, including both Roman Catholics and fundamentalists. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League had this to say: "More seriously, to call Jesus a homosexual is to label Him a sexual deviant. But what else would we expect from a man who previously said, 'From my point of view, I would ban religion completely.'" Even from gay circles there was a negative assessment of the British singer's comments. "I don't think that comments like this are particularly helpful," Reverend Sharon Ferguson from the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement told ABC News.

This is not the first time Elton John has been at the center of religious controversy. His song, "If there's a God in Heaven (What's He Waiting For?)" stirred opposition from conservative Christians in 1976 when it was released on his Blue Moves album. He was married to his gay lover, David Furnish, in London in 2005. So, we ought not to be surprised that the singer would say something like this.

Why would he say something like this at this point in time, knowing that it would gain the ire of many even of his own fans? I do not claim to know his heart, but it may be no coincidence that he makes the comment on the heels of the announcement that his summer tour with Billy Joel will be canceled. Apparently Billy Joel wants to take a year off. I am not an insider on the rock music front, but it may be that this publicity will generate other opportunities.

There have been efforts by liberal scholars to argue that various biblical characters were really gay. Robin Scroggs argued that Jesus might have been gay in a book he wrote in 1983. Others have made the same case for David and Jonathan. On the one hand, such allegations are not even worthy of response, but apparently in the homosexualized world that we live in, some response has to be made. Of course, the Bible teaches that Jesus never had sex and never sinned. Gays, however, generally redefine sin so as not to include gay sex. So, the singer could make such an allegation without feeling that he was disrespecting the Savior. But he ought to realize that others--probably most others--would not have the same response.

Political ploy? Career move? Arrogance? Only God knows John's heart.

I predict that it will make him popular in some circles, but I also believe that it will damage his career overall. Many evangelicals like his music in spite of his lifestyle. I know, because I am one of them. I prefer C & W music, but I am pretty eclectic and I have a half-dozen Elton John albums (really, albums, not CD's) in my collection. I doubt that I will buy anything else from him.

Maybe it's just hard to get old as a performer.

Chad Owen Brand

HAITI'S DEBT CANCELLATION: JUSTICE OR GRACE?

2010-02-15T18:51:00.004-05:00

Haiti's Debt Cancellation: Justice or Grace?

On Friday, February 5, US Treasury Secretary Geithner announced, “Today, we are voicing our support for what Haiti needs and deserves – comprehensive multilateral debt relief.” On Saturday the G7 finance ministers declared their agreement with Geithner--Haiti would not have to pay back its debt. In light of the terrible loss and the indescribable pain taking place in that Caribbean nation, such an act is understandable and appropriate. But is it "just"?

Sojourners believes that this move constitutes "a matter of justice," and the only "just" approach to Haiti's billion dollar debt. Hayley Hathaway, in an article published online February 8, made that very case. Here is the heart of her case.

"This is also a win for debt campaigners and people of faith and conscience around the world. Fifteen years ago, the U.S. Treasury Secretary never would have uttered what Geithner said on Friday. It would have been considered crazy to cancel Haiti’s debts to help it recover. Debt was sacred; countries had to pay their debts before anything else — before clean water, education, or health. Yet thanks to a growing call from people of faith around the world who believed in scripture’s vision of debt cancellation and restoration of right relations between nations, the Jubilee movement was born."
http://blog.sojo.net/2010/02/08/victory-for-haiti-debt-cancellation/

All of this sounds very fine and it tugs at our heart strings, especially in light of the terrible suffering we see chronicled on television screens every night. And I mean that! I am not being sarcastic. But there are a couple of issues that arise from Ms. Hathaway's article that give me pause.

First, she appeals to the Jubilee Law of Leviticus 25:8-12 in making her case. The Jubilee Movement, a movement founded in 2000 for the purpose of "seeking to cancel the
debts of impoverished countries" (from their website), has argued that the Jubilee of the OT entails that poor countries ought not to have to pay back their loans. I argue that the Jubilee law does not mean that at all. The problem here is hermeneutical. The Jubilee law was instituted so that families would not permanently lose their land because of poverty. During the Jubilee year all lands that had been lost as a result of collateral for loans had to be returned to the families from which they had been taken. Land in Israel was a zero-sum game. Once lost, it would likely never be returned. That family would be cursed to perpetual poverty. Hence the Jubilee year. Every family could recover from its losses if it could just be patient. But it was a matter of land. The Jubilee reminded that Israelites that everything came from the hand of the Lord, and that all wealth had to be held with a loose grip.

That is not the same situation with reference to the debt of poor countries. They have borrowed money from lending institutions and from countries that have capital to lend to extricate themselves from poverty, to build infrastructures and businesses to help bring themselves out of debt. And there has been great success in many places in the world, especially among the "Asian Tigers" in doing just that, though hardship still exists in many places throughout the world. But that fact is also worthy of exploration. With all the capital out there, why have many countries, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, had such a difficult time pulling themselves up by the bootstraps? The answer to that is vast, but among answers would be: political corruption in nations receiving help so that only the few in power receive the benefice (can you say, "Haiti"?), lack of incentive to do work on the part of many when handouts are coming their way, and legal and environmental restrictions placed on them by the lending nations. Malaria kills more Africans every year than AIDS, and that malaria could be destroyed in a few years by the application of DDT, but Rachel Carson's famous book (and other arguments by environmentalists) has caused Western nations to refuse to apply DDT. If malaria were wiped out, many African nations would have a real "leg up" to finding their way to productivity. But leftists do not want that.

In my opinion many leftist intellectuals are the modern incarnation of plantation owners. They decry the loss of American manufacturing jobs to third world countries, even though those losses have dramatically increased the productivity of those nations. At the same time they issue their calls to give donations of cash, goods, and debt forgiveness to those very countries. They want governments to be charitable to poor countries, but they do not want them to find their own productivity in a global economy.

The second issue that bothers me about Hathaway's article is her use of the word "justice." That is the catch-word for leftists on the global poverty issue. It is "just" to forgive their debts. It is "just" to transfer Western wealth to them by transfer payments of one kind or another. If Copenhagen is instituted, that is exactly what will happen. Governments will levy taxes against productive Westerners and transfer that money to the Third World countries, where, again, it can be stolen by corrupt politicians and just given to people without any expectations that such funds will ever eventually enable them to stand on their own two feet. Is that "justice"? Not in my opinion. It might be "grace" at some level (though likely a misbegotten and mishandled version of grace), but it is not "justice." The left is currently trying co-opt that word for their own purposes, but thinking Americans will not let them do that. Justice and generosity are not the same thing.

What apparently is being forgotten here is that those loans given to third world countries came from somebody's pocket. They came from me, and from you, and from hard-working auto workers in Oslo, and from farmers in Spain, and from waitresses in Toronto--"eh?" They came from these people because they came from taxes levied by Western nations and from banks where people like this have their savings accounts and 401K's. But people like Hathaway would have you think that these monies came from evil bankers and heads of corporations. Therefore, the loans just have to be "forgiven"and then evil will pass out of this world like the smoke from fireworks rises up and passes out of sight. What is "just" about that? It is not that easy, especially when those same poor nations will need other funds again and not very long from now. What then?

This is a complex issue. I am not trying to mitigate that. And I do believe in generosity. I am a Christian--I believe very much in generosity. But generosity does not consist in giving away someone else's money. What should we do? We should do Jubilee--real Jubilee--and in most cases we already have. Western colonial powers decolonialized in the 1940's through the 1970's. The land was given back to the people. That really was Jubilee. Some debt should be written off. In other cases, interest payments ought to be reduced. But what we really need is for Western governments to stop taxing their people in "unjust" ways, and allow people of faith who are skilled in building businesses and in making money to go to these places and help them build businesses that will enable them to compete in a global market--yes even compete with American businesses.

Here's my point: don't let leftist Christian organizations try to manipulate you into believing that the problems of the world lie with the West. The problems of the world are a result of sin--Western sin, Southern sin, and all kinds of sin. The solution is not another government program--whether a Democratic one or a Republican one. The solution, insofar as there is any solution in this age, lies in the application of atonement to every situation--even the problem of global poverty.

I pray for Haiti every day. I also pray that both grace and justice will prevail so that the earth shall be filled with His knowledge and glory as water that covers the sea.

Chad Owen Brand

YOUNG OBAMA AND MARXISM

2010-02-15T14:40:00.002-05:00

Young Obama and Marxism

In the video posted below there is a fascinating interview with John Drew, who knew Barack Obama when they were poly sci students together at Occidental College. It is an intriguing interview.

Chad Owen Brand

2010-02-15T14:39:00.001-05:00

SCOTT BROWN'S VICTORY

2010-01-19T21:27:00.006-05:00

What Brown Can Do For You

I do not know that I have anything unique or profound to say about Scott Brown's victory as a political issue. But as many of you know, I am feverishly trying to finish edits on a book that deals with the interface of Christianity, America, and economic issues. So, on that basis, and on basis of my own research into these things, here is my read.

Americans are, and have always been, a compassionate people, a fair people, and a sober people when it comes to matters economic. Those commitments have led Americans sometimes to take odd stands on matters politic. So, when the Industrial Revolution resulted in many moving to the cities, cities that were then over-crowded with under-employed and hungry people, some Americans embraced socialism, or at least some mild version of it. But the numbers who accepted hard-core Marxism were always very small in comparison. A greater number embraced the Social Gospel (which was not Marxist), and still even larger numbers embraced various forms of sacrificial compassion. Americans have not been, by and large, extremists on these issues. So, in recent months, as they have perceived that the federal government was moving in the direction of greater forced redistribution, their instinct to compassion, which is still very much there, has raised a red flag out of fear that "compassion" can sometimes be used by politicians as a stalking horse for other political ideals.

Americans are a fair people. This has led significant numbers in the distant past to embrace unionism. But, being fair, they also began to recognize when unions themselves began to use strong-arm tactics and to ask for special benefits and exemptions. In the recent debates over health care, the Democrats in Congress indicated a willingness to exempt unions from some of the restrictions on health care that everyone else would bear--everyone else except Congress (and the unions). Somehow, THAT does not seem fair! If politicians cross that fairness line, they are in deep trouble in America.

Americans are a sober people when it comes to economics. Not everyone, of course, but most Americans know what it is like to keep a family budget. It was a great American who said, "A penny saved is a penny earned." They understand pinching pennies so that you can later be able to splurge on a family vacation or buy a nicer car. But they know that you have to pinch pennies to get there. The last year has been nothing but one huge spending spree by the federal government, with cap and trade, health care reform, and green concerns running rampant over everything. We are spending like the drunk at the bar who pulls out his American Express Card and says, "Give everyone whatever they want." Some time later, when the hangover wears off, somebody has to reconcile the bill, and normal people can't rob a bank, print money on their computer, or just blow it off. At some point, somebody was going to walk to the bartender and say, "That's enough." This time, it was the voters in Mass who did that.

Do you know who won this election? The American people. I don't care if it was a Republican or a Democrat, quite frankly. In the last administration, drunken spending was too often the case. Why can't we return to the promises and the platform of 1994? When the government shrinks and spends less and is more concerned about balancing budgets than breaking them, we all win. I have six grandchildren. The burden that is going to be placed on them is already immense. Maybe, just maybe, because of what happened in, of all places, Massachusetts, that burden will be barely bearable.

Chad Owen Brand

INTERLUDE ON SHERLOCK HOLMES

2010-01-03T16:49:00.007-05:00

INTERLUDE BLOG ON SHERLOCK HOLMES

I know I have been promising to finish the blog on American Evangelicalism and the Economy, and I will have a second installment up tonight or tomorrow, but this has been an unusually active weekend for Tina and me on the movie theater front, and the second film we saw was Sherlock Holmes. I want to share a few thoughts on that.

Someone said about Augustine that he was like a guy who had spent too much time reading and rereading too few books. (That is not my comment on Augustine, by the way.) One might have made a similar comment about my reading practices when I was a teenager. Though I did read hundreds of books from age 13 to 18 (actually, probably between 1,200-1,500 altogether in those five years--my dad was always complaining that I read too much), I was also guilty of reading some books over and over again. Among my favorites were Tolkien's four volumes (which I read four or five times in that period, and I have now read 25 times), Asimov's Foundation Trilogy (which I think I read three times in those five years), Cooper's The Pathfinder ( a couple of times), Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage (three or four times), and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Complete Sherlock Holmes (three or four times at that time and several times since). There were several other science fiction books that I read more than once, but the books above were the biggest impact on me during those mid-teen years. I also read the Bible through several times during my years 17-18.

When you read the same texts over and over again, you create your own mental image of what that world is like, how the subjects speak, how to pronounce the names (especially a challenge with Tolkien), and the actual look of the location of the events (the old west) or even of the building where these events occurred (i.e., 221 B Baker Street). So, when one of these stories is finally presented in film, you can have a tendency to hate the film because it gives a different mental image of how that "world" looks than the one you have envisaged. That was a barrier to me when the Lord of the Rings films appeared a few years ago, though I was pleasantly surprised at how much of it was similar to my own imagined understanding, though I did not like the departures from the script (Tolkien's) that happened repeatedly in those films.

With Sherlock Holmes and the new film starring Robert Downey, Jr. the situation was different. There have been previous attempts to capture Holmes, dating back to "The Hound of the Baskervilles," in 1939 (what a magic year for film), starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson--still one of my favorite films. There have been several other, not very notable, attempts in recent decades to capture the Holmes essence. For me, the only one who really "got" Holmes was Rathbone. Even now, when I read "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," or "Silver Blaze," for instance, I can see in my mind's eye Basil Rathbone, curved pipe held in right hand, deep in thought in his big shabby chair there in London. He and Bruce collaborated on fourteen SH films in fourteen years.

I expected to be disappointed by Downey, Jr. I have never liked him very much as an actor. I am not even sure I know why. I just thought him to be unremarkable. (I have not see Iron Man yet, though I am planning to very soon.) I was surprised. I really liked him as Holmes. Let me go through the downs first and then the ups.

The story plays fast and loose with the person of Holmes created by Conan Doyle. Though he fancied himself something of a boxer, he is not an "Extreme Fighter" in Conan Doyle's novellas and short stories. But he is here. Several times in the film he is engaged in serious fisticuffs that would have made Steven Seagall or Mel Gibson proud. At first the Victorian hackles on my neck rose and I wanted to say to my wife, "Let's get out of here--this is not Holmes." But I didn't, and I will tell you why in a minute. Then there is Irene Adler. She figures heavily into the film, and figures as someone with whom Holmes had apparently had a liason in a hotel. Hmm, Adler is in the stories, but she is a character in only one of the short stories ("A Scandal in Bohemia"), and there is absolutely no hint of anything romantic between Holmes and Adler. Doyle's portrait of Holmes is of a rather stuffy Victorian bachelor when it comes to anything resembling romance. He admired Adler, but only her mind. I think that even if she had remained in London and been featured in other stories, that their relationship would have been, specifically, Platonic. Plato believed the philosopher-kings (or queens!) would have no need for or interest in romance and marriage, hence the term, "Platonic relationship." If anything, Holmes would have qualified for philosopher-king in a different political world.

These are the two most egregious departures from the "historical Holmes" (if you can have a "historical" figure who was fictional). So, what of it? My response? No Big Deal! New looks at older figures almost always have to go through some kind of metamorphosis. That is especially true if you want to make any money on the art. I don't think that most twenty-first century Americans would be interested in a film that recaptures the essence of Holmes himself. We live in a time when detectives get in fist fights--all the time. We live in a time when crime-fighters have a woman on their arm--a beautiful woman. If anyone is going to sell Sherlock Holmes at the box-office today, it would have to be something like this new Holmes. I did not say that I like it; I merely acknowledged that this is the nature of the case. So, no big deal! I like the movie, and I am about as fussy a curmudgeon as you will find on the Holmes image.

OK. Now to the positive. I really liked the film, and I really, really liked Robert Downey, Jr. He is better as a middle-aged Londoner than as anything else I have ever seen him play. He really has captured the essence of Holmes more than anyone, with perhaps the exception of Rathbone. And that is good, since it appears there will be a sequel. He captures the heart of the Holmes, who sometimes uses drugs when he does not have a case to work on, whose habits are less than tidy (the film may have overplayed this element), but who strikes to the heart of any situation with his incredible attention to detail and his decisive intellect. Downey, Jr. nailed that! He also captures Holmes's wit. Sherlock Holmes was often a funny guy! At least, he appreciated humor. He was not slapstick, but he was humorous in a very British way. This new Holmes does that even better than Rathbone did.

Other strengths? Dr. Watson! I have to say that I love Nigel Bruce the actor, but I always thought that he only portrayed one side of the Dr. Watson in the stories--as the foil for Holmes's intellect. I felt he was too bumbling and dim-witted. Watson in the stories usually does not grasp the situation as Holmes does, but he had been a doctor in the British Army in Afghanistan, and he is sharper than the image depicted by Nigel Bruce. But Jude Law gets it! He is great. Also, the sets, the photography, the directing were all magical.

I want to see this one again. With all the caveats I throw in to the mix above, it is still one of the best nights at the theater we've had in a while.

Chad Owen Brand

INTERLUDE BLOG ON AVATAR

2010-01-02T10:00:00.008-05:00

AVATAR

This is an interlude in my series on "Economics in the Church since Smith," but it is timely and so I decided to break up my series to offer my comments on the film, Avatar. I don't have a lot to say that others have not said, but maybe one or two new comments.

First, let me say that I enjoyed the film very much. It was entertaining, it was a generally good story, a little predictable, perhaps, and even more so for those who have followed Cameron over the years (and who has not?). Most of the characters were compelling, though not all of them, and the film kept me interested the whole way through. So, I enjoyed the film, and I feel the need to say that first, because next I am going to offer some criticism.

The movie was clearly political, far more political than Cameron's earlier films. Not only is that clear from the film itself, but Cameron himself has said so on more than one occasion. It is anti-human, or at least, anti-most humans. The little bit at the end that says, in effect, the Navi decided to allow a few aliens to remain on their planet is a punctuation to that. But the film is filled with anti-most-humans sentiment throughout. Of course, what it is against is about as interesting and surprising as the fact that the Canadian-born producer will make money on this venture. It is anti-military, anti-non-green, anti-American (at least Bush and Reagan's America), and anti-Custer.

And I have to say, that is fine with me. Film makers have the freedom to promote whatever agenda they might have in their films, and we, the movie-going public, can buy it or not--literally or figuratively. The problem with the film for me was that the people Cameron likes are portrayed in a sensitive, sympathetic, and realistic manner, but the ones he does not like in the film are, generally, not portrayed in this manner. Colonel Quaritch is the best example. Cameron clearly wants us to hate him, and we do. All of us hate him. But that is just the problem. No one is that monochromatic. I lined up and waited for two hours the night Star Wars debuted. We hated Darth Vader, but we sensed that there was another part of his story that we did not yet know about. So, we could hate him, but in a way kind of "bracket" that hate. No one can bracket their hate toward the Colonel. He's just a bad guy. The same is true, but to a lesser degree of Parker Selfridge, the "head" of the project. Sully, Neytiri, and Dr. Grace, on the other hand, are complex individuals with mixed emotions, conflicting commitments, and polychromatic personalities. I think Cameron could have done a better job depicting the Colonel and Parker. But maybe he could not bring himself to believe that such persons really are more subtle than he thinks they are. Maybe Cameron should live in the real world for awhile and have lunch with some real military people and even play cards with a few Republicans.

Some have noted that this film is similar to Dances with Wolves. I see the similarity, but I don't care about that. If someone came up with a completely new genre it would probably be a bad film. Someone once said there are only 17 Country and Western songs out there, and that the really creative person is the one who finds a way to repeat one of those songs in a new and fresh way. I agree with that.

Oh, and by the way, the ending leaves everything wide open for a sequel. What? A sequel to a James Cameron film? No one would ever expect that!

I liked the film. I will probably watch it again. But I am not going to drink the KoolAid.

Chad Owen Brand

ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC

2009-12-30T19:24:00.001-05:00

ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC:
WHERE WE WERE, WHERE WE ARE
AND WHERE WE ARE GOING

The rapid-fire proposal of new economic policies by the current administration in Washington has left many of us breathless. Cap and Trade, bailouts, health-care reform, climate change legislation are all programs that have the potential of severely altering what America has stood for in matters related to the economy. Though never officially Laissez-faire in policy, America has generally followed a more free-trade, lower federal taxes, and less redistribution of wealth approach than has been the case in many European countries and, of course, in the communist bloc when it existed. That has been where we have stood, though not unanimously so. But, as the proverb states, we need to see where we have been in order to see where we ought to be going. This is the first of a multi-part essay on America and economics. Obviously this is not intended to be thorough, though it is a sample of a larger project that I have been working on that is now nearing completion. This first installment will show where free trade, lower government philosophy about economics comes from, and how antebellum nineteenth century Christian thinkers reacted to it and to America’s rapid rise to being and industrial powerhouse. The second part will look at what brought us from there to the Great Depression, and the third part will track our history from that signal event to where we are today.

The story begins, in a sense, not in Philadelphia, but in Glasgow. Adam Smith was a Scotsman, a moral philosopher and educator, and in 1776 he published what would be his most famous book, The Wealth of Nations. It would take a separate essay even to introduce Smith adequately, but in a few sentences we can at least trace the key elements of his book, and what he was trying to accomplish with it. Smith was convinced that the mercantile system of economics that prevailed in his day was outmoded and destructive of wealth. It was based on the belief that real wealth was to be found in hard coin or bullion, gold and silver, and that the more of this that a nation owned, the wealthier it was. In order to maintain that level of wealth, therefore, governments micro-managed their economies, putting heavy restrictions on imports and on buying anything from other nations that would decrease their stockpile of “wealth.” Governments also managed the economy in many other ways in terms of productivity, prices, and distribution.

Smith opposed all of this. He began with a new definition of “wealth.” For him, wealth is the productivity of a nation, and that has little if anything to do with how much gold bullion a king might have in his cellar. Since wealth was productivity, he encouraged that governments ought to remove all restrictions to productivity, and that entrepreneurs ought to restructure their business models around three ideas: free trade, the division of labor, and the development of new technologies.

It was in America, the nation founded the same year as Smith’s volume on the wealth of nations, where his ideas would first be tested and tried, though England was close behind, and Germany not far behind England. In order for Smith’s project to be undertaken in full measure, several freedoms were needed. First, political freedom was a necessity. Some kind of republicanism or democratic republicanism was a basic requirement. Through the Middle Ages the authorities, whether kings, barons, or other types of unelected political powers, often saw fit to confiscate the property of those under their jurisdiction. Then again, in various sorts of ways the governments at various levels controlled prices, production, and distribution. It was against this “mercantilist” system of political economy that Smith had dedicated his efforts. It would be only in a political economy that eschewed mercantilism that could witness whether or not Smith’s theories might be workable. The American form of government as it crystallized in the Constitution offered that very kind of political freedom since most government officials in the federal system would be elected in some form by qualified holders of political franchise, and since, for a variety of reasons, the early American economy was virtually free from government intrusion.

Second, freedom of press is crucial to a capitalistic political economy. This is the case since the press needs to be free to disseminate information about the nature of the exchange of goods and services and about the ethical status of various industries. It must also be free to report on any alleged government intrusion into the economy. There must be no coercion from the state over the press, and there must be freedom for one form of the press to monitor whether other forms of the press are being manipulated by business interests for their own purposes.

Third, freedom of markets is fundamental to this system. That is almost by definition basic to Smith’s approach to economics. What we need to note here is that the American government early on played little role in manipulating markets, in interfering with production, and, for the most part, in overly taxing products for consumption by the populace. The free market means small government regulation of trade, low tariffs on goods imported, low taxes on sale of goods, and not preferring one industry or one company over against others. Though there was considerable disagreement on such matters as the national bank and on whether the federal government had any right at all to tax goods and services, the early American experiment was closely aligned with Smith’s ideology on this particular issue of markets.

Because America was a place where there was little regulation of the economy, Smith’s ideas seemed to bear themselves out, in some cases even long before his book appeared. New England was financed early on by joint stock corporations, especially the Massachusetts Bay Company and the Plymouth Bay Company. The men who founded these companies back in England were known as “adventurers.” That seems an odd name for men who never left home, but it was a term etymologically related to our modern term “venture capitalist.” These men went out on a limb and invested their own money in a “venture” which might not have met with success with the expectation that they would realize a profit. The venture was relatively free from government regulation, and the profit would, hopefully, be relatively free from government monitoring since it was obtained outside the normal network of government oversight. The New World of British colonization in the Western Hemisphere would seem to offer a pragmatic testing ground for ideas like those represented in Smith’s philosophy.

Specific intellectual responses to Smith in America were mixed. This was to be true in the general intellectual world and in the world of Christian intellectuals. In America the two “worlds” were not widely separated until later in the nineteenth century. In this way, America was different from Europe and even England, where the Enlightenment had created two intellectual communities, one of them broadly Christian, and the other decidedly non-Christian, and even anti-Christian. In America, the intellectual world of the early nineteenth century was still, generally, a Christian intellectual world. Stewart Davenport (Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon, University of Chicago Press, 2008) has identified three responses to the new “political economy” ideology developed by Smith and carried on by the French Physiocrats and Smith’s other disciples: the clerical economists, who were supporters of Smith’s approach; the contrarians, who opposed it; and the pastoral moralists, who adapted it to their own moral ideology. All three groups were represented by avowedly Christian thinkers, each of whom claimed that his theory was completely consistent with biblical ethics and the teachings of Jesus. Just how did each group make its case?

The “clerical economists” were supportive of America’s rapid rise to commercial success and were further sanguine about Smith’s overall approach to political economy. They supported free trade, the division of labor, and the rapid evolution of industrialized technology. They held these views in spite of the so-called, “Adam Smith problem,” which was that Smith’s theory was not in any sense compatible with biblical or otherwise altruistic ethics. These individuals were well-known Christian leaders, mostly educators, who did not believe that Smith’s approach to political economy was anti-Christian or necessarily injurious to the spiritual life of those who were being affected by it in the marketplace.

One of the most outspoken supporters of Smith was Baptist minister and professor of moral philosophy, Francis Wayland. At the heart of Wayland’s own moral theory lay a commitment to Scottish Common-Sense Realism. This was a worldview articulated by, among others, Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. Reid and Stewart were convinced that God had established the world according to certain natural moral laws and that humans were endowed by God with the ability to discover what those laws were. Wayland and the other political economists contended that Smith’s approach was intuitive, that it was pragmatically advantageous, and that its utility was being proven in the material success of the American experiment. So, for Wayland, the proof lay in a mix of natural theological intuitions, utilitarianism, and American millenarianism. As a college president and professor, he also wished to extend the scope of these ideas to the point of changing the college curriculum to include more practical discipline.

On the other side of the debate lay a group known to historians as the “contrarians.” Chief among them were Presbyterian layman and industrialist Stephen Colwell and sometimes-minister and educator Orestes Brownson. Colwell married into wealth and spent most of his adult life managing his father-in-law’s iron foundries. But he traveled widely in Europe and there witnessed what he thought to be the natural result of political economy—a starving working class made of the many and an opulent ownership class made up of the very few. He believed the same thing was happening in the United States of America in the 1830s and 40s. He laid the blame for all of this on the explicit self-centeredness of Smith’s approach. Tell people that satisfying their own interests and their own needs is entirely appropriate, and they will do just that, and the devil take the rest. “It may be worth inquiring whether the principles upon which free trade is urged will not go far in their ultimate conclusions to dissolve the whole fabric of human society,” he wrote. He opposed free trade, the division of labor, and the development of industrial technology. All of it, he was convinced, was evil and could not be reformed.

Orestes Brownson concurred with Colwell, at least in the early years of his writing. Brownson loathed economic inequality during the period before 1840. He especially was angry at anyone who argued that God approved of such inequality in the name of progress and civilization. He contended that the gospel itself was against any sense of inequality. The clerical economists had argued that class distinction is not important, and that it may lie even in the providence of God. Brownson replied that social and economic inequality was created by men, and that such inequalities must now be reversed in the name of progress, even if that meant an assault on private property. He was not opposed to private property per se, but he was against any kind of hereditary property. He was not, then, a communist, but did call for the state to reform all laws related to wealth inheritance. The basis for his views was primarily religious in nature—he believed the Bible was against the call to financial success.

The clerical economists, then, supported America’s rapid rise to industrial leadership and wealth and the philosophy that supported and informed that rise. The contrarians were opposed to such industrialization and wanted the US government to intervene. There was also a third group, identified by Davenport as the “pastoral moralists,” a group less-well identified ideologically, but people who recognized the danger inherent in industrialization, free trade, and the division of labor, but who were not philosophically opposed to it. Among them was William Arnot, who warned, “Among the elements of the nation’s greatness lie the seeds of sure decay. The very abundance of our material resources, and the very excess of our mercantile enterprise, seem to be forcing into earlier maturity the vices that will lay our glory in the dust.” These pastoral moralists were ministers first, and so found themselves from time to time having to warn their people, pastorally, of the danger that lay in the accumulation of wealth. These men, including Presbyterian pastor Henry Boardman, Unitarian Andrew Peabody, and Congregationalist Joseph Emerson, were not ideologically opposed to capitalism, but were concerned about what capitalism might become in the hands of entrepreneurs.

Three responses to the rise of industrialization and to the philosophy that underlay it—the philosophy of Adam Smith. All three responses from antebellum American Christian leaders, some educators, some captains of industry, some pastors. What none of them suspected was that there was lurking in the shadows a much more strident voice, one that was not buttressed by quotes from the Bible, but one that would sound a clarion call against Smith’s project. We will take that up in the next installment.

Chad Owen Brand

Of Scarecrows and Tin Men: GCR and the Economic Health of the SBC and the Country

2009-12-19T08:51:00.003-05:00

OF SCARECROWS AND TIN MEN
THE GCR AND THE ECONOMIC HEALTH OF THE SBC AND THE COUNTRY

L. Frank Baum published The Wizard of Oz in 1900. Though it is now generally seen as one of the quintessential children’s stories, it was originally intended also as a political satire on the Presidential election of 1896. The campaign was waged against the backdrop of the economic panic of 1893 that was almost as severe as the Great Depression. In the story the Tin Man represents the factory workers, forced to work so many hours to make a living that their grueling labor caused then to lose their hearts. The Scarecrow was the late-century farmer, duped by robber barons to get out of debt by making more silver coinage, thus devaluing the money through inflation, but, what did they know? They hadn’t got a brain. At least, so goes the interpretation. All of this was taking place on a stage set right before a new century dawned—a century of hope for the country, perhaps even for the world.

On April 16, 2009, President Daniel Akin of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary preached a message entitled “Axioms of Great Commission Resurgence.” It was in some sense a response to many concerns that had been voiced for several years throughout the SBC for more conversions and more baptisms both on the mission field and here at home. It was in another sense a clarion call for Southern Baptists to lift up their chins, to raise their heads, to clench their teeth and march forward in mission thrust as they had done in 1919 with the Seventy-Five Million Campaign. The response to Akin’s challenge from key SBC pastors and most of the entity heads was immediate and passionate. They saw this as a moment when we as Southern Baptists could once again say, “Let’s Roll.” And make it happen.

To make something like this happen, to see it through, takes more than a sermon and conference or two. It takes a strategy that takes into full account the strengths and weaknesses of our institutions, the real condition of our churches, and the strength of our resolve. It also must consider the obstacles before us, obstacles of many kinds. One of those obstacles is the economic condition of our denomination and of our country.

All one has to do is to look at the receipts of the International Mission Board in last year’s Lottie Moon Offering. The goal was $170 Million. The actual gifts totaled $141 Million. That constitutes a $29 Million shortfall. The impact is real, it is significant, and it represents a potential retreat on the part of Southern Baptists in the area of missions. This would be unprecedented in the last century. It would also be a serious blow to our sense of call as an evangelical denomination still committed to sharing the genuine gospel with genuinely lost people who need to hear it more than anything else in their lives.

There have been significant efforts on the part of many churches and SBC entities to soften the blow of this shortfall by taking special Lottie Moon offerings in August, special one-time offerings to send to the IMB by individual churches, entities, and other similar efforts. All of those are commendable, and those who have criticized these efforts (and many, especially on the left wing of the SBC, have been critical) have done so out of an agenda that is mainly bent on bashing the Southern Baptist Convention. Still, the traditional strategy of the IMB getting about half of its budget through the CP and about the other half from Lottie Moon is the formula which has worked for decades and is still likely the right strategy for the future. So, what will happen if 2009 witnesses a similar shortfall? The impact could be devastating.

One of the components of the GCR is Article IX, which calls for the SBC to consider what might be a “More Effective Convention Structure.” One of the key statements in the GCR document says this: “At the midpoint of the 20th century the Southern Baptist Convention was a convention characterized by impressive institutions, innovative programs, and strong loyalty from the churches. But the convention has too often failed to adapt its structure and programs to the changing culture. We are frequently aiming at a culture that went out of existence years ago, failing to understand how mid-20th century methods and strategies are not working in the 21st century.” There may be reasons why we ought to reconsider the structure of the SBC, at least in part for economic reasons. We do not have unlimited resources. (There is, in fact, no such thing as unlimited resources in the human, worldly economy.)

Churches have constantly to ask themselves, “Are we using the best possible methods to carry out our calling to reach our community with the gospel?” What is true of churches ought also to be true of the SBC. We cannot simply assume that, because of what we believed in 1845, or 1891, or 1919, or 1925 to be the best methodology for carrying out our mandate, that such a methodology will be perennially right for us into perpetuity. It is always good to reevaluate methodology. Not message. That IS perennial. So, we should trust the Task Force to be good stewards of their mandate, and to give due consideration to their recommendations at the right time.

The economic challenges before us are real. Cap and Tax. The Bailouts. Health Care Reform. If all of these were pushed to the limits that some in Congress would like to see happen, there is little doubt that we as Americans would be more and more impoverished in the years and decades ahead. Already the printing of currency to stave off the economic crisis has seriously devalued the dollar and created an impending new crisis. Has anyone in Washington ever taken Economics 101? Has anyone in Washington any sense of historical perspective about what Germany went through in the 1920s? I wonder. The challenges of the future could be far more profound than we anticipate even now.

On the other hand, the IMB difficulties, severe as they are, could be easily solved. The shortfall was $29 Million. There are about 8 Million Southern Baptists who attend church at least once a month. Do the math. That is less than 4 dollars per person. If we can’t get Southern Baptists to pony up an additional 4 bucks a person for our mission offering every Christmas, then the problem is not the economy.

L. Frank Baum seemed dubious about the prospects of the future, but at least he could entertain the children. Let us hope we can do far more than that. There is much at stake.

Chad Owen Brand

Calvin for Profit

2009-10-23T20:17:00.003-04:00

In a brand new book, Calvin and Commerce: The Transforming Power of Calvinism in Market Economies, by David Hall and Matthew Burton, readers are treated to a smorgasbord of theological, political, and economic wisdom that, if heeded, could transform the nature of the debate taking place in our political arena right now. The book is filled with great research into the political and economic implications of the Reformation, especially the Genevan version, but in this blog I am only going to touch on a very few of the items that are worthy of comment.

The authors make a case that the reforms enacted under Calvin's leadership in Geneva were nothing short of astounding in impact. Largely because of Calvin's consistent teaching on obedience to God, thrift, Sabbath keeping, generosity, hard work, and making use of God's created order as good steards of the gifts of God, the city's productivity sky-rocketed in short shrift. When Calvin came to Geneva in 1536 there were fifty merchants, three printers, and few if any nobles. By the late 1550s Geneva was home to 180 merchants, 113 printers and publishers, and at least seventy aristocratic refugees who claimed nobility (page 27). This was the result of two primary forces--Calvin's teachings and the attractiveness of the city to refugees and others looking for a place to go in fleeing religious persecution.

Those are fascinating statistics. In fact, they are more facinating to me than they were even to the authors of the book, who do not make much comment on the numbers. Here is what I mean. During times of dislocation and demographic movement, it is not common for commerce to thrive. This is especially in the case in static societies, such as Reformation Europe, where people did not typically move far from their birthplace. But think about this even in a more modern context, late nineteenth century European migrations to the United States. Anyone even vaguely familiar with the large influx of "European Trash" (as they were often called at the time) into New York City, Chicago, Detroit and other large northeastern cities knows what the impact was: slum neighborhoods, massive unemployment, crime (Mafioso and others), alcoholism, and social unrest. This went on for decades in some places. But not so Geneva. Why? The major reason is that the city was being reformed under godly teachers, and that the theology of work, whcih is heavily based on a theology of creation, fall, and redemption, caused a rising economy, not a falling economy to develop.

The authors of the book have reasons why this sort of thing would work at all. They write, "Views about wealth flow from theology or ultimate values. The thesis of our claim is that financial and business concerns are not separate from but an extension of theological (in this case Christian) beliefs" (page xvii). What a thought! Financial and business concerns are an extension of theological values. Anyone who has studied the history of economics (even in a cursory way) knows this to be true. Adam Smith argued for free markets, private property, private ownership of the means of production, low governmental taxation, inheritance rights, and freedom of all to engage in whatever commerce they desired, religious liberty. The result--the most productive and wealthiest nation in the history of the world, the United States. Karl Marx argued for abolition of private property, a heavy graduated income tax, the abolition of inheritance, centralization of credit in the hands of the government, the abolition of religion. The result--The Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea.

Ideas have impacts. Anyone who would like a better understanding of the impact of Reformation thought on economics and the potential for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" ought to take a read on this new book. There is an old saw about Capitalism. "Capitalism is the worst sort of economic system around; except for all the rest." I believe that! In a day when our government is edging its way toward the Marxist pathway, we need to wake up and smell the Genevan coffee. Let's don't go there!

Chad Brand

Eschatology forum

2009-09-26T18:10:00.001-04:00

To listen to the forum on end times that Professors Ware, Schreiner, and Brand held earlier this week, just go here:

http://www.boycecollege.com/

2009-09-07T18:49:00.003-04:00

Heart to Heart

I have been preaching through the Sermon on the Mount, and one thing we have discovered is that Jesus laid down some very high expectations for his disciples in that message. "Except your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." "He who is angry with his brother may be in danger of hell fire." "Do not judge others." "Do not worry about anything." "Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." Those paraphrases of just a few of the expectations of Jesus point out how high and daunting is this expectation of discipleship. Moses' words from his mountain are not any more difficult than Jesus' words from his mountain. So, what do we do with that? What's a Christian to do?

In the Old Testament there are two passages which I had never juxtaposed until the last twenty-four hours, and I think that what we learn from these two texts might point us to a way to deal with Jesus' expectations.

In Jeremiah 17:9 we find the prophet making a very harsh indictment of the Jerusalemites of his day. "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?" The Weeping Prophet makes this statement as a part of his lengthy indictment of the people of Judah in his day. They were idolaters, they had no desire to keep God's law or honor his covenant, and so, as Jeremiah warns them, God is going to send a fire storm of judgment on them. There is a sense of course in which all humans have deceit in their hearts, and this verse of Scripture is rightly used by systematic theologians (like me!) to point out that all persons have sin in their lives. It is also important to note, though, that the statement has special force here in the historical context of Israel's idolatry and rebellion. It is true of Israel in general, at this time, that the people's hearts were marked by deceit and desperate wickedness and not much else.

Contrast that statement with 1 Samuel 16:7. "But the Lord said to Samuel, 'Do not look at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.'" The context here, of course, is Samuel's search for a replacement for Saul, and God has led him to the house of Jesse in Bethlehem. Gazing on Eliab, eldest son of Jesse, Samuel believed he had found the man, due to the boy's doughty stature, but the Lord, of course, would choose David because the Lord looks at the heart.

Now, how do we understand the contrast here, and what might this tell those of us who have the task of discipleship before us? David was no less of a man born into this world with a nature of sin than the Jerusalemites of Jeremiah's day. David himself admits this when he writes, "Behold I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin my mother conceived me" (Psalm 51:5). In addition, David was a man who would commit sins both large and less large. He would become an adulterer and he would conspire to murder. In addition to that, there are texts that hint that some of his warring was not exactly pleasing to God (he was a "man of bloodshed"). In contrast to Genesis 2:24 David would take many wives, and when those wives bore to him children, he had a difficult time raising some of them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. When Amnon raped his half-sister, David did not exact the penalty prescribed by the law. And when Absalom exacted retribution by killing Amnon, neither did David deal with his son in the manner given by Moses. There seems plenty here to make us wonder, "how is the heart of David any different from the heart of Jeremiah's enemies?"

The answer is, that David's heart was greatly different. First, his heart turned toward God early and stayed toward God all his days. For all his failures, David did not want to be a spiritual failure. He wanted to love and serve God. That comes out over and over again in his Psalms. "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!" "I will give thanks to the Lord with all my heart, I will tell of all your wonders." "Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for him." "Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer." Sinner though he was, David all of his life wanted to know God. He was never content with the nature of his spiritual experience of God, and more than anything, he wanted to know God.

Second, when confronted with his sin, David always took the blame for his own sin and repented. Contrast David with his predecessor, Saul. When Saul was confronted with his failure to do the will of God in 1 Samuel 15, he blamed his soldiers for taking the plunder, and then went on to say that he had disobeyed God for God's own good, in order to make sacrifice to the Lord. Samuel's response was that God desired obedience rather than sacrifice. Saul only admitted doing wrong after Samuel told him that God was taking the kingdom from him. By contrast, when David was confronted by Nathan the prophet after the sins against Bathsheba and Uriah, when Nathan pointed the long, bony prophet's finger at David and pronounced, "Thou art the man" (some passages only work in the KJV), David confessed his sin and repented before God. Further David would write a Psalm of repentance (Psalm 51), akin to Augustine's Confessions (a bishop admitting publicly to the sins of his younger years) so that all would know of his repenting. And he would also pen these words: "O Lord, you have searched me and known me, you know when I sit down and rise up, you understand my thoughts from afar. . . . Search me, O God, and know my heart, try me and know my thoughts. And see if there be any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting." Saul would never have composed those last lines, but the man who committed grave sins still wanted more than anything else to serve and know the Lord. Though a sinner, and even a terrible sinner, David's heart was different from the hearts of those in Jerusalem who would fall to Nebuchadnezzar.

So, what about the Sermon on the Mount and its demands on us? What about Christian discipleship in general? Well, in the New Testament we find exactly the same kind of teaching about the heart that we observe in these two Old Testament texts. In Matthew 15:19-20 our Lord said that out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness and slanders. And John, in his first epistle states "We shall know by this that we are of the truth, and shall assure our heart before him, in whatever our heart condemns us; for God is greater than our heart, and knows all things. Beloved if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God" (1 John 3:19-21). The heart can be filled with evil, or, on the other hand, it can be the dwelling place of God (Eph. 3:17).

The Bible lays out for us the demands of discipleship, and it lays them out with great clarity and specificity. "If any man will come after me let him deny himself, take up the cross and follow me." There is no excuse for half-hearted spirituality. There are only two gates, one of which is wide and easy, and the other of which is narrow and hard. The Lord is clear--pick the narrow and hard way. And pick it will all your heart!

As Jesus said those words in Matthew 5-7 he knew that no one who ever lived would live up to those demands perfectly throughout an entire lifetime. The only one who would do it would be he himself. Most of us have broken every one of the demands in the Sermon on the Mount at some point in our sinful existence. We have all stared at a woman to lust at some point. We have all wanted retaliation against a wrong on some occasions. We have all had anxiety over food and raiment at various times. We have judged others unfairly. We have sometimes done unto others what they have done to us--and that was not pleasant! Like David, we have had hearts for God, but sometimes hands for the devil. So, how do we cope with this?

Like David, we must be people who never stop seeking the Lord. Early and late, during youth and dotage, we must be people who are constantly composing new psalms, even if only in our own private prayers. We must tell God that we love him, over and over, even in the midst of our weaknesses, failures, and spiritual inadequacies. Even in the midst of our sins. We must be people who desire not only to do good works, but to do them for the Father, consciously presenting them to him. "Here, Father, I taught this class, I made this hospital visit, I gave this food, but I gave it so that you would be pleased with me, Father. I don't care if anyone else noticed, but I did it for you." This is what it means to be a person after God's own heart. This is why David danced before the Lord when he brought the ark into Jerusalem. Some misunderstood and despised him for it, but he did not care--he did not do it for them. And neither do we carry out our ministries for them, but for the Father.

Like David, we must be people who never stop confessing our sins. When we confess our sins, we are saying, "Lord, there is still that in my heart that is not pleasing to you. I find in myself the very thing Jeremiah spoke of, and I hate it. Take it from me." The reason that David's heart was a heart that God was pleased with was that he saw the defilement in his heart and sought to have it exorcized; the Jerusalemites in Jeremiah's day thought that their hearts were perfectly fine. Like Saul, they thought they were, basically, OK. The one who thinks his heart is pure is defiled; the one who sees defilement in his own heart is one who, as Jesus said in the Beatitudes, is "pure in heart." If you follow the progression in the Beatitudes, you don't get to purity of heart, though, till you first admit your poverty of spirit, and then mourn for your sins. The Sauls and the Jerusalemites of this world will not do that. The Davids of this world do it all the time.

What does this mean for us, when you boil it all down? Seek God every day. Realize that you cannot be an occasional Christian. When you sin, go to God and pour out your heart of confession. Realize that every moment of every day is lived in the company of a heavenly Father who wants nothing more than to bless those who hunger and thirst for him.

Let's live like that! Is there any other way to live?

Preaching on Sin

2009-08-11T20:24:00.001-04:00

My father-in-law early on was not altogether proud to have a preacher in the family, but on one occasion when I told him that I was on my way out to preach, he urged me, “Well, give ‘em hell.” I tried to retort that this was not really what I was supposed to do. On later reflection, though, it seemed to me that I certainly was intended to give them, or at least display to them, hell. And in showing them hell, the preacher must show them the road to hell—the pathway of unrepented sin. Preachers must preach on sin.

Of course, there are great temptations not to preach on sin(!) Brian McLaren tells us that this is not the way to reach Gen-Xers. Robert Schuller told us this was not the way to reach Boomers. Harry Fosdick told us this was not the way to reach Moderns. I am sure we could find such sentiments all through history, and the reason is that we do not like to be told that we are sinners, and so, preachers who preach on sin take the chance of alienating their congregations, or at least some members of their congregations. Here is the problem with that fear—at a certain level the task of preaching is precisely to alienate. We are to expose the sinfulness of the congregation by preaching the gospel, and such gospel preaching includes preaching on sin. If we are unwilling to do that, then we are, in A. W. Tozer’s words, “water-boys of the pulpit.” Let me explain what I do mean by alienation, and what I don’t mean by it.

Both Paul and Jesus begin their gospel presentations with a discussion of sin. After a few introductory words and a preliminary consideration or two, Paul spends two and a half chapters at the opening of Romans discussing the sinfulness of humanity—all humanity. And of course, he does so eloquently and passionately. These words are endemic to the gospel itself, since, in telling the gospel story we have, presumably, to tell why Jesus ever came to die on the cross in the first place. Without sin, there is no beautiful manger scene (and of course, it was not all that beautiful, anyway); without sin, there is no healing of the sick or raising of the dead; without sin there is no Sermon on the Mount. Here is the point: sin is the context in which all of those things took place, and so, we cannot preach the gospel without preaching on sin. In other words, you cannot tell people about their best life today until you remind them first of their worse life yesterday.

Paul is not alone in this. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, after some preliminaries, expounded on the sinfulness of humanity—all humanity. In Matthew 5 beginning in verse 21, Jesus, in this wonderful inaugural message in Matthew, in which the gospel is explained with great clarity, expounds on six commandments and the ways in which the Jews were, on the one hand, misunderstanding them, and, on the other hand, breaking them. I have space here to elaborate on only the first two. Jesus addresses the laws against murder and adultery. He makes it clear that the common understanding of those laws is superficial, and in his truly authoritative fashion, he says, “Amen I say to you that you shall not live in a state of settled anger with your brother; Amen I say to you that you must not stare at your sister to lust.” Those two sins indict the entire human race. And this is something that was obvious even to pagans. In Greek mythology Ares, the god of war, was romantically linked to Aphrodite, the goddess of sex. War and sex. Anger and Lust. They seem opposite, since anger pushes the other away while lust lures the other close, but they are actually very similar. At the root of each lies the ego. “I have decided you are unworthy. I have decided to want you.” They are different in content but similar in intent. Even the Greeks knew there was a link between these illnesses, and that even their gods were infected with the disease. Of course, by the time the Greeks were anesthetized by the Romans, they no longer cared.

So, for Jesus, as well as for Paul, an explication of sin is an essential, a non-negotiable part of the gospel proclamation.

How deeply this infection runs in modern culture! So, do we simply let the disease take its toll, or do we do something about it? Let me tell you—their momma is not going to do anything about it in many cases. In a day when Baptist septuagenarians are shacking up, just who is going to try to keep the fox out of the henhouse? Well, if no one else will do it, then the pastor gets the call. And he should. And he better.

The preacher must declare that unrepented sin itself is alienation. The unrepentant sinner is alienated from God—either as a non-believer or as a believer under discipline from the Lord. The unbeliever, even the one in my church or your church on Sunday morning, stands in danger of hell-fire, as Edwards reminded us in his famous sermon. Curiously, in Jesus’ even more famous sermon, after discussing the sins of anger and lust, he said exactly the same thing. “If you do not deal with your sins of anger and lust, you are in danger of hell-fire.” Let me tell you something, fellow pastor, your members will not all faint if you occasionally use the word “hell” from the pulpit. (Well, not all of them!) I know the word was probably overcooked at one time in history, but undercooking is no more palatable than overcooking.

So, we preach on alienation, but not in order to alienate. We preach on alienation in order to reconcile. So, when you preach on sin, do it with tears in your eyes and not a flash of anger. (Don’t preach against anger angrily.) When you preach on sin and alienation, do it recognizing your own sinfulness and alienation. Admit that you, too, have been where they are, and that you are not the expert come here to lecture them on getting their lives right. You are simply the one who got out of the mire before they did, so that you could throw them a rope of rescue. But when you preach on sin, make it clear that this is a crucial moment. With both anger and lust, Jesus said, “Do something now! This is not the time to mull it over. Get out now, or you may be in hell by morning.” Preachers need to remind themselves of that, too.

Chad Brand

(This article also appears in the current issue of The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology)

Our Daily Bread

2009-07-18T19:10:00.006-04:00

Jesus taught his disciples to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread" (Matthew 6:11). I think most people who read this see it as saying, "Ask the Lord to give you and your family food if you are hungry." Of course, Jesus says nothing about being hungry. In the Ideal Prayer, it is simply the first petition that he tells us to speak after we have honored God in our prayer first. But it is not only a prayer to be prayed by the poor--it is a prayer everyone of us should pray.

Jesus uses extreme brevity in outlining the nature of kingdom praying. Three "You" lines addressed to God--his honor, his kingdom, and his will--, and three "us" lines detailing what we should pray for ourselves--food, forgiveness, and freedom from overpowering temptations. He leaves it to us to think through the implications of all of this. Give us our bread. Just what is involved in that? I like Luther's comment on this line. He wrote, “When we pray for bread we are praying for everything necessary for the preservation of this life, like food, a healthy body, good weather, house, home, wife, children, good government, and peace—that God may preserve us from all sorts of calamities, sickness, pestilence, hard times, war, revolution, and the like." That is exactly right. But notice the little word, "our." This is not to be an individualistic prayer, but a prayer addressed to God about our families, our neighborhoods, our nation, and our world. "Give all of us this day our daily bread." What we pray for, we intercede for, and what we intercede for we are to be engaged with. If we pray for bread for all, then we ought to be engaged at some level in seeing to it that such a thing happens. But how?

If we take Luther's words seriously, many of us will need to expand our understanding, not merely of this simple prayer, but of our role in longing for justice in the world. So, what does "give us this day our daily bread" mean practically? It means that those of us who can ought to give bread, or give the wherewithal to obtain bread to those who have none. But Luther rightly recognized that most people who will get bread will get it, not as a gift, but through work. So, we need to pray that God will open doors of labor so that we may earn our bread. Pray that we can find ways to prepare ourselves through training to be employed in our chosen fields. Pray that he will give us good health, so that we will have the ability to work. We need to pray for a good government that will afford people equal opportunities to find work and to be employed--and not to make it easier for some parts of the work force to profit and more difficult for others to do so by its own policies. We ought to pray for a good business environment and for the freedom for companies to pursue the profit advantage. After all, bread comes from profit. No profit, no bread, or perhaps little bread, or maybe unhealthy bread. We need to pray for a good labor force so that workers will be as efficient and hard-working as possible, since bread comes from hard-working and efficient people. We need to pray for a good economy, since it is only in that context that bread will be available to as many as possible, and that as many as possible will be employed in order to do everything we have outlined above.

Remember that our prayer for bread is for all of us to have bread--my family, my church, my neighborhood, but also the entire world. This makes it more complex, obviously, for lots of reasons. Those of us in the West surely realize that we have more bread, better bread, tastier bread, and healthier bread than many in the rest of the world. And we also ought to recognize that we ought to do something to make the field more level. The question is, what do we do? At one level we give bread. We give bread to Darfur and hope it does not wind up in the hands of pirates. But is giving bread the long term solution for most of the world? No. Agriculture experts tell us that we have the ability in terms of production to feed twelve billion people right now. That is more than twice the world population. So, if there were no distribution problem (and there is a huge one), it is possible that we could feed the world as it is. But is that the right way? No. The solution is to find a way to carry out the process I outlined above globally. To give bread, but then to help people find work so that they can buy their own bread, and to pray for and work for improved health so that people can stay employed, and to pray and work for government policies that will allow businesses to work free from over-regulation or interference, and to pray that companies will profit so that all who work there will have more bread, better bread, and so on.

The barriers to this are enormous. Most governments around the world do not want such a free marketplace, since they prefer to curry favor with parts of the economy that will support them, give to them, not oppose them, and so on. But if those barriers could, over time, be addressed, how could such a venture be successful? In their book, On Kingdom Business, Tetsunao Yamamori and Kenneth Eldred show how it is possible for the gospel to advance and for people to have more bread, not merely by receiving gifts, but by becoming entrepreneurs, if American and other Christians who have been successful in business will simply hear the call of the gospel to bring both the Bread of life, and the bread of the table to Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, South Asia, and the rest of the world. Scores of Christian entrepreneurs are now busy taking the story of the gospel and the story of business success to the world. These are people who have taken time out of their own business success stories to give time to helping others figure out how to make bread. Some took early retirement, hearing the call to do just this as their life's calling in their retirement years. It seems to me that this is the kind of thing that will make a substantial difference in the lives and lifestyles of people around the world asking, Give us this day our daily bread.

There is, however, an irony. At a time when American business leaders might have the opportunity to do more than at any other time in history to help lift up the economies of countries around the world, our own country is going backwards in its commitment to the economic models that have made us such an industrial powerhouse. Recent legislation and potential future legislation, if it is all passed, will hinder the very American entrepreneurs I have been discussing from being as helpful as they can be, since this legislation would take away much of their wealth. I have been hearing a lot of rhetoric about "We tried capitalism, and it didn't work. Look at the recent economic crisis." There are several things wrong with that statement. First, as economist Mark Skousen says, "We have never really tried capitalism." Just as the American industrial engine was firing up in the first decade of the twentieth century, politicians, listening to muck-raking journalists, imposed taxes, regulation, and anti-trust legislation that hindered industry from being efficient. During the 'thirties the federal government gave special favors to certain industries and corporations because it benefited the federal government to do so. It was those policies that prolonged the Great Depression, which probably would only have been known as The Significant Recession, if not for federal policies that kept us in economic downturn for eight years. Toward the end of the century much of that regulation was removed, but now, here we have it coming back--in spades. And why? Because of a bad economy, a bad economy largely foisted on us because of government policies changing on a variety of fiscal issues. Second, it was not capitalism, laissez-faire policies, that got us into the current pickle. It was the opposite--government tinkering in the economy. And now, we are moving in a direction that pretty closely follows Karl Marx's recommendations in his 1848 volume co-authored with Engels, The Communist Manifesto.

Let me make one thing clear. I am not placing one political party over the other. Both sides voted for the recent legislation, and both will likely vote for future legislation that could take us further into this pit. There is a part of me that wants to say, "A pox on both your houses." I love E. V. Hill's statement, "I don't go for the left wing and I don't go for the right wing, because they both flap off the same sick bird." Now everyone who knows me knows that I identify with traditional conservative views in the political sphere, but parties don't mean what they once meant. So, our task is to appeal to traditional American values on some issues, but especially to appeal to the Bible. If we are going to pray, "Give us our daily bread," we ought to support the type of economic and political model that can make that the most doable.

Well, I guess you know what I am preaching on Sunday, July 19.

Chad Brand

The Ideal Prayer

2009-07-09T18:40:00.002-04:00

This Sunday I am preaching the first half of the so-called "Lord's Prayer." Of course, we should probably not call it that, since it is not a prayer that the Lord would have prayed, since He did not need to be forgiven of sins. It is the Model Prayer, or the Ideal Prayer. I am not going to preach my sermon here in the blog, I only want to make an observation or two. First, this is the only time where Jesus calls God "Our" Father. He is always "My" Father, and some times "your" Father. But in this one place he uses the first person plural. But again, notice that he is not one who could ever pray this prayer. He is telling us that when WE pray, we should think of God as "our" Father. Not "my" Father, but ours. Why? Several important issues.

One, Jesus' experience of God as Father is unique to Him. God is our Father by grace, but He is Jesus' Father by nature. Jesus is the "only-begotten" Son of the Father, the monogenes, in Greek. That is why Jesus never speaks to a group and refers to God as "our" Father. My experience of God's Fatherliness, wonderful though it is, is infinitely inferior to that of the Lord. Not because God is at fault, but because I am at fault. Imagine a child in a house with a wonderful father. Now, mind you, this father is still a sinner, but he is a wonderful dad. But this child, like all children, along the way will disobey his father, he will misunderstand his father, he will misuse his liberties, and so on. Because of that, his experience of relating to his father will have its own defects--some perhaps because of the father's defects, but more because of the son's disobedience, rebellion, etc. Our Heavenly Father has no defects, and Jesus always did His will, so the experience Jesus had (and has) of the Father's good gifts will be an infinitely greater and more blessed experience than mine can ever be.

Two, Jesus wants us to understand the the Fatherliness of God draws us together and makes us brothers and sisters in Christ. No one of us has a greater access or greater appeal to God's Fatherliness than anyone else does. An Iranian Christian has no less access to God as Father than a Texan Christian. God smiles on his Sudanese children just as much as He does the ones in Kentucky. The Fatherliness of God is a corporate experience, not merely an individualistic one, and it is an experience that makes us part of the same family. Because of this, I find the hymn defective that starts out, "I walked through the Garden alone." Especially the lines, "He walks with me and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own. And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known." That's just a lie. The phrase, "Our Father," simple, plain, unostentatious though it is, renders that song a lie. (I know, Brad Paisley and Alan Jackson both recorded it, and I have their recordings on my itunes, but it is still a lie.)

Three, Jesus wants us to think of God as Father. Not as Parent. Not as Mother-Father. Karl Barth said it well (got to give him credit when we can): we must speak the language of Canaan. The language of Canaan is patriarchal. God is the Father of Jesus, and He is our Father as well, if we have been adopted into His family. (Plug here for Dr. Moore's new book.)

Church members of Northside Baptist Church, and students at SBTS, God is your benevolent Father. He is your disciplining Father. He is your educating Father. He is your comforting Father. He is your law-giving Father. He is your forgiving Father.

So, tonight, when you get ready to turn the lights out, and you think of the fact that you live your life in the very present and watchful light of the heavenly Father, thank Him that you can say the words, "Our Father." It is hard to imagine two more encouraging words than those.

Chad Brand

2009-07-03T14:36:00.004-04:00

Northside Baptist Church is launching a new website, and one of the features is this new blog--Brandishings--by me, the pastor, Chad Brand. (Pretty clever, huh?) As you may know if you are looking at this blog in the first place, in addition to being the pastor of Northside, I also am Professor of Theology at Southern Baptist Seminary. I am hoping that this blog will feature opportunities for us to think about the church in culture, and what that means in every respect. I am proud of my denomination for recently launching Great Commission Resurgence. I am hopeful that we as Southern Baptists, as evangelicals, can work together to see a new resurgence of evangelistic efforts. My community (Hardin County), like all of yours, needs the Lord. I am proud to be able to work alongside people like Eddie Turner, John "Tree" Akers, both of whom are pastors at Northside, and many others in our church to win E-Town to the Lord. (And, of course, we will be doing it alongside the other evangelical, Bible-believing churches in our county.) That is our calling--to glorify God with our lives, and one of the things that brings Him greatest glory is when people are saved.

I hope you will check in here from time to time, see what is going on with us, and feel free to add your own comments. I thank God every day for the abundant blessings He has heaped on me, with church, the seminary, and above everything, a great family to be part of. I hope the Lord blesses you and yours in abundance.

Chad